1 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 


BY  JOHN  CURTIS  UNDERWOOD 

THE  IRON  MUSE 

AMERICANS 
LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

TEN  STUDIES  IN  RACIAL  EVOLUTION 


MARK  TWAIN,  HENRY  JAMES,  WILLIAM 
DEAN  HOWELLS,  FRANK  NORRIS,  DAVID 
GRAHAM  PHILLIPS,  STEWART  EDWARD 
WHITE,  WINSTON  CHURCHILL,  EDITH 
WHARTON,  GERTRUDE  ATHERTON  AND 
ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS 


BY 

1  JOHN  CURTIS  UNDERWOOD 


NEW  YORK 

MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 

MCMXIV 


COPYRIGHT  1914   BY 
MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 


^v 


Printed  in  America 


Vail-Eallou  Co.,  Binghamton  and  New  York. 


TO 
M.   H.   U. 

AND 
B.   McK. 


M6681 3 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

PREFACE  i 

I     DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN  1 

II     HENRY  JAMES,  EXPATRIATE  41 

III  WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  AND  ALTRURIA  87 

IV  FRANK  NORRIS  130 
V     DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  AND  RESULTS  179 

VI     STEWART    EDWARD    WHITE    AND    ALL    OUT 
DOORS  254 

VII     WINSTON  CHURCHILL  AND  Civic  RIGHTEOUS 
NESS  290 

VIII     CULTURE  AND  EDITH  WHARTON  346 

IX     MRS.  ATHERTON  AND  ANCESTRY  391 

X     ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  AND  COMMERCIALISM  447 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

PREFACE  i 

I     DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN  1 

II     HENRY  JAMES,  EXPATRIATE  41 

III  WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  AND  ALTRURIA  87 

IV  FRANK  NORRIS  130 
V     DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  AND  RESULTS  179 

VI     STEWART    EDWARD    WHITE    AND    ALL    OUT 
DOORS  254 

VII     WINSTON  CHURCHILL  AND  Civic  RIGHTEOUS 
NESS  290 

VIII     CULTURE  AND  EDITH  WHARTON  346 

IX     MRS.  ATHERTON  AND  ANCESTRY  391 

X     ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  AND  COMMERCIALISM  4-47 


PREFACE 

Criticism  of  literature  per  se  is  a  lost  art  in 
America  to-day.  To-morrow  or  the  day  after  it 
will  come  back  as  an  exact  science  and  part  of  a  con 
structive  insurgent  revolt  against  machine-made  and 
slipshod  conditions  in  literature  and  in  the  life  that 
literature  interprets. 

Any  American  criticism  that  is  fit  to  survive  or 
worthy  of  the  name,  must  recognize  that  authors, 
editors,  publishers,  malefactors  of  great  and  lesser 
circulation  and  all  their  works,  are  to  be  classed  es 
sentially  as  products  of  environment  and  forces  that 
react  on  the  same,  and  so  dealt  with. 

The  fact  that  muck-raking  has  been  made  profit 
able  and  that  our  muck-raking  magazines  have  proved 
their  fitness  to  survive  and  to  adapt  themselves  to 
American  needs  and  ideals  of  to-day,  represents  the 
most  important  economic  advance  of  the  last  fifty 
years. 

Sooner  or  later  in  the  present  campaign  of  edu 
cation,  in  the  new  reorganization  and  realignment  of 
I  our  mental  and  moral  assets  and  liabilities,  our  pres- 
I  ent  system  of  literary  and  journalistic  production 
I  and  distribution  is  due  to  come  in  for  its  full  share 
I  of  muck-raking  and  constructive  criticism. 

The  series  of  articles  on  The  American  Newspaper 
I  by  Will  Irwin,  published  in  Cottier's  Weekly  during 
the   summer   of   1911,    sufficiently   foreshadows   this 
i  tendency.     A  similar  series  of  articles  on  The  Amer 
ican  Magazine  by  an  author  of  equal  reputation,  in- 


ii  PREFACE 

spired  by  an  equal  passion  for  speaking  the  truth 
without  fear  of  favor  to  anyone,  might  prove  quite 
as  much  to  the  point. 

If  our  journalism,  like  the  machine  politics  that  it 
represents,  is  our  most  crying  national  disgrace  to 
day ;  if  numbers  of  our  yellowest  yellow  journals  and 
the  smuggest  and  most  conventionally  respectable  of 
the  American  press  "  higher  up  "  are  the  mouth 
pieces  of  Big  Business,  and  directly  or  indirectly  its 
paid  prostitutes  and  liars,  the  very  cynicism  of  their 
open  immorality  has  served  to  divert  public  atten 
tion  from  other  vital  factors  in  the  formative  proc 
esses  of  American  thought  and  literary  and  social 
morality,  that  in  the  long  run  cannot  and  will  not 
be  disregarded. 

Any  man  in  the  street,  in  any  one  of  fifty  or  more 
of  our  largest  American  cities,  can  tell  you  facts 
about  the  rottenness  of  American  politics  that  might 
well  make  Benjamin  Franklin's  or  George  Washing 
ton's  hair  stand  on  end. 

Any  child  that  reads  and  reflects,  that  has  any 
adequate  sense  of  literary  values  in  the  up-to-date 
output  of  the  American  public  library  and  maga 
zine  world,  can,  if  so  inclined,  frankly  characterize 
and  criticise  the  woman-produced-read-and-catered- 
to-literature  of  the  day  and  hour  in  America,  in 
terms  that  might  well  make  Washington  Irving, 
Lowell,  Lanier,  Emerson  and  Hawthorne  turn  over 
in  their  graves  and  gasp. 

At  the  same  time  it  takes  a  social  and  literary 
vivisector  of  the  first  order  like  David  Graham  Phil 
lips  to  reveal  the  pretenses  and  the  posturings  of  the 
"  good  "  women  of  America  —  the  conscious  and  un- 


PREFACE  iii 

conscious  literary  and  artistic  snobbery  of  the  so 
cially  eligible  and  refined  partners,  wives,  mothers, 
daughters  and  sisters  of  our  most  prominent  male 
factors  of  great  wealth,  and  their  subordinates  and 
trade  rivals  —  for  exactly  what  they  are  worth. 

It  takes  a  poet  and  a  prophet  like  Frank  Norris 
to  write  an  epic  like  The  Octopus,  or  a  book  like 
The  Responsibilities  of  The  Novelist,  the  only 
volume  of  American  criticism  during  the  past  ten 
years  that  has  proved  its  fitness  to  survive  beyond 
the  lifetime  of  the  present  generation ;  and  to  tell 
us  that  the  genuine  interest  of  the  district  messenger 
boy  in  his  Deadu'ood  Dick  is  of  more  significance 
and  vital  importance  to  the  future  of  American  lit 
erature  than  the  pretenses  and  the  posturings  of  the 
most  select  inner  circle  of  literary  illuminati  and 
dilettanti. 

If  either  Norris  or  Phillips  had  lived  to  carry  the 
logic  of  their  criticisms  to  the  bitter  end,  we  might 
have  had  some  very  interesting  revelations  of  their 
attitude  of  mind  toward  our  most  expensive  and 
useless,  most  fashionable  and  sterile,  American 
magazines,  and  toward  the  publishing  houses  and 
vested  interests  represented  directly  and  indirectly 
by  them. 

It  is  a  sufficient  commentary  on  the  attitude  of 
these  two  men  and  the  logic  of  accepted  facts,  to 
state  that  the  only  two  world  novelists  of  acknowl 
edged  power  that  Twentieth  Century  America  has  so 
far  produced,  rose  to  their  present  prominence  in 
spite  of  rather  than  by  the  aid  of  the  "  best  people  " 
in  our  American  literary  world  and  their  backers  and 
abettors ;  and  that  these  two  men,  were  no  more  con- 


iv  PREFACE 

tent  to  be  exploited  financially  than  to  be  lionized 
socially  by  the  sort  of  people  to  whom  our  most  cos 
mopolitan  and  dilettante  advertising  mediums  for 
special  interests  in  American  life  and  literature  natu 
rally  appeal. 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  of  certain  periodicals, 
published  simultaneously  in  New  York  and  London, 
and  read  chiefly  by  women  of  the  class  that  Phillips 
vivisected,  that,  together  with  the  business  interests 
and  commercial  methods  they  represent,  they  have 
become  something  less  than  sources  of  supreme  sweet 
ness  and  light  to  their  own  readers  and  to  the  Ameri 
can  people  at  large. 

Under  their  unbeneficent  rule  and  leadership  the 
clutch  of  the  machine  has  tightened  perceptibly  on 
the  intellect  and  the  sense  perceptions  of  the  mil 
lions  and  of  the  dilettanti  alike,  while  free  literary 
competition  has  been  minimized  in  their  columns,  and 
debased  elsewhere.  American  illustration,  like  the 
American  short  story  during  the  last  ten  or  fifteen 
years,  has  shown  a  distinct  retrogression;  American 
essays  and  critical  articles  in  magazine  acceptation 
have  become  a  minus  quantity;  American  fiction 
serialized  has  been  sacrificed  to  fashionable  and  gen 
erally  uninspiring  literary  importation  from  abroad ; 
the  ethics  of  commercialism  and  cheap  mediocrity 
have  infected  the  earlier  ideals  of  inspiration  and 
service  in  which  these  magazines  were  conceived  and 
founded;  and,  last  and  most  conclusive  and  damning 
proof  of  all,  American  poetry  in  many  of  our  leading 
"  literary "  magazines  has  reached  an  irreducible 
minimum  of  slush  and  near-slush  over  names  wholly 
or  comparatively  unknown,  that  is  as  much  a  living 


PREFACE  v 

lie  and  denial  of  the  racial  temper  and  smothered 
aspiration  of  the  American  people  of  yesterday,  to 
day  and  to-morrow  as  any  Wall-Street  inspired, 
bought-and-paid-for  prostitution  of  our  Metropoli 
tan  newspaper  press. 

Poetry  that  is  real,  that  is  fit  to  survive  through 
the  centuries,  needs  no  defense.  Like  truth,  the 
very  vital  color  of  whose  voice  it  is,  it  rises  triumph 
ant  from  each  defeat  to  summon  men  and  women  to 
greater  heights  of  aspiration,  to  greater  intensities 
and  charities  of  common  humanity  shared  and  ex 
alted.  Such  poetry  is  ready  for  the  making  in 
America  to-day.  Great  poetry  like  all  great  litera 
ture  is  born  of  storm  and  stress  in  the  individual  or 
the  community. 

There  never  was  a  time  in  the  history  of  the  world 
when  the  material  of  such  poetry,  so  rich  and  com 
plex  in  its  color  scheme,  so  potent  and  vital  in  its 
content  and  inspiration,  lay  so  close  at  hand  beneath 
the  eyes  too  blind  to  see  it,  as  in  America,  the  melting 
pot  of  the  nations,  to-day. 

And  there  never  was  a  century  in  the  history  of 
man's  long  struggle  upward  from  the  brute,  when 
the  heart  and  soul  of  a  great  nation  were  so  rest 
lessly  expectant  of  some  spiritual  message,  some 
thing  of  lasting  and  significant  value  in  prose  or 
verse,  to  give  charm,  color  and  power  to  the  dreari 
ness  and  debauchery  of  everyday,  workaday  exist 
ence,  as  the  beginning  of  this  Twentieth  Century  and 
the  present  month,  week,  day  and  hour  of  this  year 
of  grace  in  conventionally  Christian  America. 

Poetry  and  prose  of  this  order  of  distinction  the 
System  that  dominates  literary  America  has  denied 


vi  PREFACE 

us ;  and  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  if  our  three 
most  misrepresentative  American  magazines,  and 
some  ninety  per  cent,  of  their  parasites  and  prosti 
tutes,  their  numerous  head-line  contributors  by  re 
quest,  editors,  sub-editors,  business  backers  and  ex 
ploiters,  could  be  blotted  out  of  existence  to-morrow, 
the  American  people  as  a  whole  would  be  better  rather 
than  worse  off. 

This  is  said  in  all  charity  to  people  who  (like  Wall 
Street-inspired  editors,  reformers  in  politics  who 
become  mere  masks  for  the  machine,  and  other  gen 
tlemen  and  ladies  of  still  more  questionable  morals 
and  social  antecedents)  have  not  the  brains,  the  cour 
age  and  the  capacity  to  free  themselves  from  false 
positions,  and  who  remain  equally  the  victims  of  the 
machine  rule  that  to-day  dominates  every  depart 
ment  of  American  life. 

Outside  the  slum  and  the  university,  the  misdi 
rected  and  ineffectual  energies  of  our  conventional 
churches,  the  defective  working  of  our  free  public 
educational  system,  and  the  tentative  efforts  of  a  few 
public  libraries,  mental  and  moral  conservation  of 
the  individual  and  the  race  is  an  undiscovered  coun 
try  to  the  mass  of  the  American  people  to-day. 

Men  like  Norris  and  Phillips  have  begun  to  un- 
v  mask  its  vistas.  The  muck-rake  magazines  have  re 
vealed  the  exceeding  grimness  of  its  frontier. 

But  in  general  we  remain  as  we  have  been  since  the 
American  pioneer  learned  to  dominate  the  forest,  the 
prairie,  the  desert,  the  mountains  and  the  rivers  by 
machinery,  and  in  turn  suffered  the  machinery  that 
he  had  evolved  to  dominate  him ;  and  we  exist  to-day 
a  machine-made  people,  conventionalized,  standard- 


PREFACE  vii 

ized,  commercialized  as  to  our  food,  clothes,  houses, 
homes,  offices,  factories,  theaters ;  amusements,  so 
cial  wants,  pleasures  and  obligations  ;  working  plans  ; 
civic  and  social  responsibilities ;  local  and  national 
pride,  and  its  absence  or  perversion. 

Europe  has  called  us  with  some  reason  a  nation 
of  white  Chinamen. 

The  typical  American  of  to-day  rises  by  ma 
chinery,  to  the  sound  of  a  factory  whistle  or  a  fifty 
cent  alarm  clock.  He  gets  himself  into  clothes  made 
by  machinery,  whose  fabric  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten, 
to  a  greater  or  less  extent,  is  infected,  shoddy,  and 
the  product  of  sweated  labor  and  an  iniquitous  tariff 
system. 

He  consumes  a  breakfast  made  by  machinery  and 
the  cold  storage  warehouse,  whose  staple  products 
are  invariably  trust-made  or  controlled. 

He  rides  from  breakfast  to  his  place  of  work  in 
a  public  conveyance  owned  or  controlled  by  another 
ring  of  franchise  robbers  or  profit  parers  at  the 
community's  expense.  As  often  as  not  he  stands 
up  all  the  way,  and  reaches  his  destination  in  a 
frame  of  mind  that  makes  beating  the  conductor  and 
the  company  out  of  his  fare  seem  something  like  art 
act  of  civic  virtue. 

On  his  way  he  reads  the  news  of  the  day  as  ma 
chine  politicians,  yellow  journalists  and  others 
"  higher  up  "  see  fit  to  hand  it  out  to  him. 

Arrived  at  his  shop,  factory  or  office,  he  goes  to 
work  according  to  the  routine  of  his  machinery  of 
existence;  for  a  trust,  for  a  concern  dominated, 
influenced,  threatened  by  a  trust,  or  by  a  labor  or 
ganization  whose  tyranny  is  as  direct  and  uncom- 


viii  PREFACE 

promising,  as  much  an  outgrowth  or  phase  of 
machine  politics. 

On  his  way  home  he  finds  the  rush  for  and  in  the 
cars  even  more  inhuman  and  demoralizing.  He  sees 
young  men,  conventionally  gentlemen,  stealing  seats 
from  working  girls  or  older  men.  He  sees  women 
shoppers  of  the  same  order  proving  themselves  simi 
larly  the  machine-made  barbarians  that  their  gowns, 
hats,  feathers,  furs  and  miscellaneous  and  assorted 
trinketry  indisputably  advertise  them  to  be. 

If  he  is  able  to  read  at  all,  he  repeats  in  his  even 
ing  paper  the  tale  of  American  civilization's  faults, 
follies,  immoralities,  treasons,  infamies,  and  deceits 
as  the  incidents  or  direct  results  of  machine  rule. 

Home  or  its  mechanical  equivalent  reached,  he 
meets  his  wife  who  is  a  still  more  artificially  machine- 
made  product  than  himself;  they  consume  their  cold 
storage  dinner  to  the  accompaniment  of  a  discus 
sion  of  the  machine-made  fads,  fashions,  infidelities 
and  other  popular  diversions  of  the  day ;  they  go 
out  to  see  machine-made  drama,  or  to  play  the  most 
mechanical  and  uninspiring  of  social  card  games 
with  the  neighbors ;  or  they  settle  down  to  an  evening 
of  equally  uninspiring  and  mechanical  literature  in 
magazine  form  or  between  covers,  till  exhausted  na 
ture  claims  its  own,  and  mind,  soul  and  body  relapse 
in  slumber. 

This  is  the  sort  of  thing  (plus  the  everyday 
household,  shopping,  gossiping  and  bridge  playing 
experience  of  the  woman  who  is  not  driven  out  of 
her  home  into  business  life)  that  happens  three  hun 
dred  days  and  nights  or  more  a  year  in  the  experi 
ence  of  the  average  American  off  the  farm,  whose  in- 


PREFACE  ix 

stinctive  reaction  against  the  mechanical  monotony 
of  American  life  for  the  millions  does  not  lead  him 
or  her  spectacularly  into  drugs,  drink  or  other 
vices  and  excesses. 

Literature  higher  up  formerly  did  something  to 
counteract  this  deadening  and  dehumanizing  tend 
ency  to  reduce  American  home  life  to  a  dead  level 
and  the  lowest  common  denominator,  expressed  in 
terms  of  money  and  what  money  can  buy  most  di 
rectly:  in  the  shop,  in  the  theater,  in  the  lobster 
palace,  in  the  divorce  court  and  all  that  leads  to  it. 

To-day  American  literature  "  higher  up  "  finds  it 
self  as  machine-made  and  soulless  a  product  as 
every  other  phase  of  the  American  life  it  has  helped 
to  distort  and  to  misrepresent. 

And  for  this  too,  for  the  good  that  they  have  left 
undone  as  well  as  for  the  evil  that  they  have  com 
mitted  and  condoned,  our  literary  malefactors  of 
great  influence  and  circulation  are  going  to  be  called 
to  answer  in  one  way  or  another,  sooner  or  later: 
they  or  their  children. 

It  does  not  take  any  vast  amount  of  culture,  edu 
cation  or  initial  brain  capacity  to  discover  that,  if  a 
large  fraction  of  the  American  people  are  system 
atically  sweated  and  underfed,  underpaid  and  over 
charged,  crowded  into  cars  like  cattle,  and  housed 
in  dwellings  where  noise,  dirt,  infection  and  the  ex 
tremes  of  heat  and  cold  are  variable  quantities,  al 
ways  to  be  met  and  fought  with,  not  in  the  slums 
alone,  then  the  physical  stamina  and  morale  of  the 
race  must  in  the  long  run  suffer,  while  the  mean 
mental  and  moral  level  must  at  the  same  time  be 
brutalized  and  debased. 


x  PREFACE 

Consequently  we  have  at  last  our  pure  food  law 
and  its  evasions,  demonstrations  of  one  sort  or 
another  against  the  meat  trust  and  the  coal  trust, 
and  the  present  perplexities  of  our  public  utilities 
commissions. 

Similarly,  corporate  aggressions  against  the  pub 
lic  domains  and  organized  looting  of  water,  forest, 
and  mineral  rights  have  finally  resulted  in  a  national 
programme  of  conservation  in  things  material. 

We  have  not  yet  reached  the  point  of  demanding 
a  pure  thought  law,  a  legal  restriction  of  the  yel 
lowest  phases  of  our  yellow  journalism,  or  a  na 
tional  movement  for  the  conservation  of  literary 
opportunity  and  reward,  and  of  the  comparatively 
small  proportion  of  his  or  her  time  that  the  average 
American  can  or  will  devote  to  any  printed  matter 
that  is  not  mere  journalism  or  the  news  of  the  day. 
.  Obviously  such  a  movement  is  bound  to  come  some- 
'  time.  It  will  depend  when  it  does  come  far  more  on 
the  canons  of  sound  and  scientific  criticism  of  liter 
ature  and  life  in  the  largest  sense,  than  on  any  pos 
sible  or  impossible  arbitrary  legal  enactment. 

At  the  same  time,  if  any  protective  tariff  is  at  all 
desirable  or  legitimate  at  any  period  of  American 
growth,  some  of  us  may  yet  come  to  see  the  desir 
ability  of  an  American  tariff  on  literary  and  dra 
matic  importations  from  Europe  before  we  find  our 
selves  fit  to  compete  with  the  rest  of  the  world  in 
these  lines  on  an  equal  footing. 

The  details  of  an  amendment  to  our  national 
copyright  law  exacting  a  national  tax  in  the  form 
of  a  cumulative  royalty  on  every  copyrighted  for 
eign  book  and  serial  publication  of  recent  date,  and 


PREFACE  xi 

the  requirement  of  copyright  registration  and  simi 
lar  cumulative  royalties  in  the  case  of  foreign  plays 
produced  on  the  American  stage,  might  be  arranged 
easily  enough,  once  the  mass  of  the  American  peo 
ple  made  up  its  mind  that  such  a  state  of  things  was 
desirable,  and  determined  to  have  it. 

Such  a  remedy  might  be  far  from  ideal ;  at  any 
rate  it  could  hardly  leave  American  literature  and 
the  American  stage  in  a  worse  state  than  that  in 
which  we  find  them  both  to-day. 

It  would  at  least  relieve  us  of  the  commercialized 
immoralities  and  hysterics  of  the  Elinor  Glyns  and 
the  Marie  Corellis,  and  leave  us  the  power  to  deal 
adequately  with  our  own  Chamberses  and  McCutch- 
eons. 

It  might  reduce  local  consumption  of  Maeterlinck, 
Shaw  and  Chesterton.  It  might  at  the  same  time 
stimulate  the  production  of  American  playwrights, 
critics,  litterateurs,  who  are  somewhere  if  not  quite  in 
the  same  class. 

It  would  at  least  help  to  stimulate  our  racial  sense 
of  ultimate  destiny  in  the  world  of  thought  and  of 
literature,  and  our  national  acceptance  of  the  fact 
that  literature  like  all  other  human  phenomena  is 
distinctly  a  product  of  environment  in  the  material 
as  well  as  the  spiritual  sense. 

With  this  fact  in  mind  the  following  essays  have 
been  written.  To  this  end  this  preface,  such  as  it 
is,  however  extreme  and  far-fetched  it  may  seem 
to  many,  has  been  gotten  together  and  addressed 
to  all  impartial  and  progressive  Americans,  readers 
and  thinkers,  doers  and  critics  of  literature  and 
life. 


xii  PREFACE 

In  view  of  a  recent  trip  around  the  world  by  the 
author,  detailed  final  revision  of  these  essays,  which 
were  prepared  for  publication  two  years  ago,  has 
been  considered  inadvisable.  In  his  estimation, 
neither  The  Inside  of  the  Cup,  Gold,  The  Reef,  The 
Custom  of  the  Country,  Perch  of  the  Devil,  De  Gar- 
mo's  Wife,  or  any  recent  publication  of  Mr.  Howells, 
Mr.  James  or  Mr.  Chambers  has  seriously  affected, 
or  is  likely  to  affect,  the  respective  places  of  these 
writers  in  literature. 

It  is  perhaps  worth  while  calling  attention  to  the 
fact  that  Calvin  Winter  is  the  name  used  by  Doctor 
Frederic  Taber  Cooper  for  many  of  his  magazine 
articles. 

New  York,  August,  1914. 


LITERATURE  AND  IN 
SURGENCY 


DEMOCRACY    AND    MARK    TWAIN 

"  One  of  the  characteristics  I  observe  in  him  is  his  single- 
minded  use  of  words,  which  he  uses  as  Grant  did  to  express 
the  plain  straight  meaning  their  common  acceptance  has  given 
them.  He  writes  English  as  if  it  were  a  primitive,  not  a 
derivative  language.  The  result  is  the  English  in  which  the 
most  vital  works  of  our  language  are  cast,  rather  than  the 
language  of  Milton,  Thackeray  or  Henry  James.  .  .  .  You  will 
not  have  in  it  the  widest  suggestion  —  what  you  will  have  in 
him  is  a  style  as  personal  and  biographical  as  the  style  of 
anyone  who  ever  wrote.  ...  in  fact  what  appeals  to  you  in 
Mark  Twain  ...  is  his  common  sense."  William  Dean 
Howells  in  the  North  American  Review,  Feb.  1901. 

ONE  of  the  things  that  most  appeals  to  us  in  Mark 
Twain's  whole  career  and  attitude  towards  life  is 
that  he  came  of  the  same  great  generation  and  river 
valley,  and  remained  essentially  a  type  of  the  same 
breed  and  make  of  man  that  Grant  did.  Each  paid 
debts  incurred  in  the  latter  part  of  his  life,  through 
no  fault  of  his  own,  in  practically  the  same  way ;  each 
led  an  adventurous  and  by  no  means  successful 
career  (as  the  world  recognizes  success)  before  he 
settled  into  his  stride  and  achieved  greatness ;  each 


2    LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

was  the  soul  of  honor  in  his  private  and  public  deal 
ings  with  his  fellow  men  ;  each  bore  the  highest  honors 
heaped  upon  him  by  his  fellow  citizens,  by  the 
crowned  heads  of  the  world  and  the  leaders  of  the 
world's  thought  ;  each  remained  to  the  end  as  modest 
and  unaffected,  as  helpful  to  others,  as  kindly  and 
sincere  in  all  essentials,  as  the  best  of  the  breed  of 
American  fathers  and  mothers,  democrats,  and  pio- 
Reertst  that  pr.oduc^d:  him. 

voiVed  in  -his  own  way,  and  very  much  to  the 
£''4te£p  $nd.  lasting  convictions  of  a  genera 
tion  of  ^Americaiis^  whose  place  in  the  world  has  yet 
to  be  filled.  Each  did  his  work  in  his  own  way, 
supremely  well,  considering  the  time  and  place. 
Each  was  essentially  American  in  this,  that  what  he 
wrought  he  wrought  with  all  his  might,  less  with 
brilliancy  than  with  vital  staying  power.  Each  in 
his  own  way  sounded  unmistakably  the  key-note  of 
strenuous  and  American  democracy  that  has  en 
dured  and  will  endure  ;  that  rises  to  the  crisis  when 
the  crisis  comes,  that  achieves  its  greatest  triumphs 
under  its  greatest  handicaps  ;  and  that  keeps  its 
head  both  before  and  after  success  or  temporary 
failure,  with  the  aid  of  national  humor  and  a  racial 
philosophy  as  big  and  broad,  as  deep-seated  and  as 
vital  as  the  sadder  and  sterner  instincts  of  the  race 
that  march  and  that  labor  with  it. 

Such  was  the  humor  and  the  temperament,  at  bot 
tom,  of  Lincoln  himself;  and  it  is  more  than  prob 
able  that  if  Lincoln  had  had  time  and  occasion  to 
preach  his  gospel  in  words  rather  than  in  deeds, 
he  would  have  written  in  practically  the  same  way 
that  Mark  Twain  did. 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN         3 

Essentially  the  same  evolutionary  factors  and 
forces  produced  them,  and,  in  more  ways  than  the 
world  yet  recognizes  fully,  bore  the  same  fruit. 

There  was  the  same  primordial  love  of  freedom, 
of  justice  and  of  charity  to  all,  in  both;  the  same 
deep  racial  sadness  underlying  the  racial  levity ;  the 
same  lasting  hatred  of  pretense  and  of  sham;  the 
same  simple^ind  kindly  affection  towards  the  vital 
things  of  nature  and  of  family  life,  that  make  up 
the  bed-rock  of  human  character  on  this  planet. 
And  to  all  these  things,  to  anyone  who  reads  them 
between  the  lines  and  below  the  surface,  the  writ 
ings  of  Mark  Twain  bear  witness  unmistakably. 

Here  we  may  quote  Mr.  Howells  again  in  "  My 
Mark  Twain,"  1906,  as  he  looks  at  his  friend's  face 
for  the  last  time.  "  I  looked  for  a  moment  at  the 
face  I  knew  so  well ;  and  it  was  potent  with  the  pa 
tience  I  had  so  often  seen  in  it ;  something  of  puzzle, 
a  great  silent  dignity ;  an  assent  to  what  must  be 
from  the  depth  of  a  nature  whose  tragical  serious 
ness  broke  into  the  laughter  which  the  universe  took 
for  the  whole  of  him  ...  all  the  rest  of  our  sages, 
poets,  seers,  critics,  humorists ;  they  were  like  one 
another,  and  like  other  literary  men ;  but  Clemens 
was  sole,  incomparable,  the  Lincoln  of  our  litera 
ture." 

And  again, —  "  He  disliked  clubs.  He  showed  his 
obsolete  content  with  his  house.  .  .  .  Clemens 
pointed  out  the  scenery  he  had  bought  to  give  him 
self  elbow  room.  Truly  he  loved  the  place,  though 
he  had  been  so  weary  of  change  and  indifferent  to  it 
that  he  never  saw  it  (Stormfield  —  his  last  home) 
till  he  came  to  live  in  it.  .  He  was  the  most  un- 


4    LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

literary  of  literary  men.  He  did  not  care  much  to 
meet  people,  as  I  fancied  he  always  went  to  bed 
with  a  cigar  in  his  mouth." 

Here  we  learn,  too,  that  while  Mark  Twain  did  not 
care  much  in  his  old  age  to  meet  new  people,  he  be 
lieved  with  Emerson,  quite  as  consistently  as  Mr. 
Howells  did,  that  "  The  ornament  of  a  house  is  the 
friends  that  frequent  it."  He  had  the  pioneer  vir 
tues  of  hospitality  and  of  loyalty,  to  the  limit.  His 
was  the  breed  of  men  who  literally  share  their  last 
dollar  with  their  friend,  and  make  no  bones  of  it ; 
and  Mr.  Howells  tells  us  that  he  was  quite  as  in 
formal  in  going  to  find  his  friends  at  all  hours,  when 
ever  he  cared  to  see  them,  as  in  making  them  wel 
come  at  his  own  home  when  they  cared  to  see 
him. 

We  may  learn  from  the  first  part  of  his  friend's 
book,  as  elsewhere,  that  Samuel  Langhorne  Clemens 
was  like  Mr.  Howells  an  itinerant  printer  before  he 
became  a  Mississippi  Pilot  and  rigorously  earned 
his  nom  de  plume. 

We  may  read  between  the  lines  that  he  was  the 
typical  native  born  American  of  the  generation  be 
fore  this  one,  restless,  surcharged  with  energy  that 
seeks  an  adequate  outlet,  unsatisfied  till  he  finds  it, 
always  pushing  farther  and  farther  West  or  strik 
ing  back  East  again  as  the  trail  zig-zags;  crossing 
the  plains  over-land,  "  Roughing  It,"  to  be  secre 
tary  to  the  lieutenant-governor  of  Arizona;  going 
into  mining  ventures  and  coming  out  of  them  richer 
only  in  experience;  drifting  to  San  Francisco  and 
doing  newspaper  work  there;  traveling  further 
West  still,  to  Honolulu  as  special  correspondent  on 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN          5 

the  typical  American  journalist's  sole  capital  of 
brains  and  energy;  drifting  back  to  'Frisco  again 
and  living  there  in  the  reduced  circumstances  that 
inspired  the  story  of  the  friend  who  met  him  with 
the  cigar-box  under  his  arm  and  learned  that  he 
was  "  moving  again  " ;  until  he  was  sent  to  Europe 
to  da  the  newspaper  letters  afterward  published 
as  "  Innocents  Abroad,"  and  the  way  was  made 
plain  for  his  later  journalistic  and  literary  ca 
reer. 

In  those  days  the  trail  to  higher  distinction  in 
both  fields  frequently  zig-zagged  back  and  forth 
across  the  lecture  platform.  Authors  read  from 
their  own  books  as  Mark  Twain  and  Bret  Harte  did 
together  from  theirs.  People  who  were  not  immersed 
to  their  ears  and  eyes  in  the  strenuous  pursuits  of 
social  or  financial  leadership,  found  time  to  meet  the 
readers  after  the  reading,  informally.  Men  who  were 
far  from  given  to  levity  fundamentally,  often  eased 
the  tension  all  round  by  the  same  methods  that  our 
after  dinner  orators  still  attempt.  Reputations  were 
made  and  solidified,  and  the  average  keen-witted  busy 
American  man  or  woman  was  afforded  an  oppor 
tunity  once  a  month  or  a  year  as  the  case  might  be, 
to  fix  on  her  or  his  favorite  author  or  authors,  or  to 
estimate  the  relative  values  of  newcomers  in  the 
field,  by  the  direct  methods  of  personal  inspection 
and  appraisal. 

On  the  whole,  this  system  of  personal  and  intuitive 
criticism,  in  default  of  a  better  one,  worked  well 
while  it  lasted. 

Nowadays  we  have  changed  all  that,  and  in  many 
ways  our  last  state  is  worse  than  our  first. 


6   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Professor  Miinsterberg  has  recently  told  us  that 
in  Germany  the  literary  center  is  still  the  book  store. 
In  France,  Paris  and  the  Academy  are  still  dominant. 
In  England  the  college  don,  the  trained  critic  and 
journalist,  and  the  old-fashioned  subscription  li 
brary  are  still  recognized  as  authorities. 

With  us  to-day,  Boston,  Harvard  College,  the 
older  New  England  systems  of  free  schools  and 
academies,  free  libraries,  and  the  Lyceum  lecture 
bureaus  no  longer  dictate  to  literary  America  in 
the  molding.  In  their  place  we  have  New  York, 
Chicago,  Indianapolis  and  San  Francisco,  and  the 
commercialized  magazines,  publishing  houses,  book 
sellers,  and  book-selling  and  advertising  methods  of 
all  four  places  and  many  more,  to  reckon  with. 

In  two  words,  our  present  literary  center,  as  it  af 
fects  the  people  at  large,  is  the  news-stand.  And 
we  who  live  in  this  dawn  of  the  century-transition 
period,  have  to  suffer  for  this  state  of  things  in  one 
way  or  another,  as  we  do  for  the  economic  forces 
which  have  conceived  and  perpetuated  it. 

It  was  not  so  in  Mark  Twain's  early  and  middle 
period;  but  the  revolt  of  good  humor  and  sound 
sense  that  he  led  against  the  New  England  hierarchy 
of  special  interest,  of  dogmatic  culture,  pretense  and 
the  Bostonian  Brahmin's  point  of  view  with  regard 
to  life  and  art  in  general,  has  not  failed,  as  its 
leader  himself,  in  common  with  Mr.  Howells  and 
many  another  of  the  older  generation,  fancied  it  had 
failed  during  the  last  years  of  his  life. 

After  the  downfall  of  any  oligarchy  and  priest 
hood  of  culture  and  inherited  privilege,  there  inevi 
tably  follows  a  period  of  something  like  anarchy  be- 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN         7 

fore  the  foundations  of  a  true  democracy,  of  an 
adequate  art  and  literature  of  the  people,  for  the 
people,  by  and  about  the  people,  may  be  laid  last 
ingly. 

Academic  purists  in  art  and  literature,  ultra-pa 
tricians  of  the  type  of  Mr.  Henry  D.  Sedgwick  —  who 
contends  from  the  typical  Harvard  point  of  view 
in  "  The  New  American  Type,"  1908,  that  we  are 
all  careering  to  perdition  through  mob  rule  in  lit 
erature  and  elsewhere,  as  fast  as  our  motors  and 
our  other  machines  can  speed  us  up  —  try  to  tell 
us  that  art  at  its  best  has  always  been  the  peculiar 
heritage  and  privilege  of  a  specialized  and  patri 
cian  class.  This  we  deny  in  toto  and  seriatim, 
and  later  we  may  proceed  to  prove  our  point  in 
detail. 

For  the  present  we  will  simply  point  to  the 
commercialized  democracy  of  Athens ;  to  the  Doric 
simplicity  and  crudity  of  patrician  Sparta ;  to  the 
Corinthian  and  ultra-Corinthian  degeneracy  that  fol 
lowed  democracy's  fall  in  Greece  and  Rome ;  to  the 
commercialized  republics  of  Mediaeval  Italy,  and  the 
names  of  the  great  masters  of  plebeian  and  middle 
class  blood  that  we  can  readily  identify,  from  Giot 
to's  time  to  Rodin's ;  finally  to  Elizabethan  England 
after  the  strangle-hold  of  Roman  Catholicism  on 
free  thought  and  free  speech  was  loosened  by  Henry 
the  Eighth,  and  Shakespeare  and  his  compeers  had 
voiced  the  new  ideals  of  free  speech  and  free  thought 
shared  by  them  with  the  Anglo  Saxon  free  men  and 
fighting  men  on  land  and  .  sea :  merchants,  sea- 
captains,  yeomen,  peasant  proprietors,  adventurers, 
men  of  letters  and  of  action,  ultimate  consumers  and 


8    LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

original  producers,  (whose  blood  and  whose  spirit 
v  survive  in  us  to-day^ 

Shortly  after  the  New  England  oligarchy,  backed 
by  the  gold  of  California  and  the  centralized  money 
power  of  New  York  and  Pennsylvania,  and  com 
manded  in  the  final  struggle  by  Western  men  cast 
in  the  mold  of  Lincoln  and  Grant,  had  broken  the 
strangle-hold  of  the  slave  trade  and  slave  labor  in  the 
South  and  the  states  and  territories  yet  to  be  settled 
and  organized,  Mark  Twain  and  his  fellow  pioneers  of 
free  thought  and  free  expression  began  to  go  back 
and  forth  organizing  the  criticism  of  local  and  in 
dividual  initiative  into  something  like  coherent  and 
representative  form:  the  genesis  of  a  new  cam 
paign  of  education  to  take  the  place  of  the  older 
Abolitionist  measures.  And  a  more  highly  organized 
revolt  against  a  more  subtle  form  of  wage  and  chat 
tel  slavery  and  intellectual  oppression  was  already 
in  the  air. 

In  all  this  Mark  Twain  was  consistently  the  typi 
cal  American  pioneer,  the  typical  American  journal 
ist,  who  keeps  his  hands  clean  and  remains  his  own 
man  to  the  last,  till  he  reached  an  eminence  where  he 
was  enabled  to  speak  as  the  first  great  prophet  of 
democracy  and  of  literature,  of  the  people,  by  the 
people  and  preeminently  for  the  people,  in  this  coun 
try  and  in  the  modern  world. 

And  the  modern  world,  in  one  way  or  another,  has 
recognized  this  fact.  He  was  no  college  man,  yet 
college  and  university  men  on  both  sides  of  the  At 
lantic  have  united  to  do  him  honor.  He  was  no  lit 
erary  man  till  he  had  hewn  out  and  refined  his  own 
technique,  but  literary  men  at  home  and  abroad  have 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN         9 

received  him  into  their  midst ;  some,  like  Mr.  Howells, 
with  life-long  friendship ;  some  at  first  with  patron 
age,  later  as  an  equal  and  more  than  equal. 

He  was  no  business  man  or  politician,  yet  he  has 
been  the  one  striking  and  significant  figure  in  our 
whole  literary  history  up  to  date  who  could  mix 
with  business  men  and  politicians,  as  with  all  other 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  women  and  children,  on 
something  like  absolutely  equal  and  human  terms, 
giving  as  much  as  he  got,  and  —  what  is  more  to  the 
point  in  our  dealings  with  business  men  and  politi 
cians  nowadays  —  getting  as  much  as  he  gave  in  the 
long  run. 

Before  going  on  to  analyze  the  secret  of  this 
power  and  the  progress  of  the  revolt  that  he  led, 
let  us  pause  a  moment  to  take  testimony  by  the  way. 
William  Lyon  Phelps,  senior  professor  of  English 
literature  at  Yale  at  this  writing,  says  in  his  ^Es 
says  on  Modern  Novelists,  1910:  "Although 
Mark  Twain  has  the  great  qualities  of  the  true 
humorist  .  .  .  common  sense,  human  sympathy  and 
an  accurate  eye  for  proportion;  he  is  much  more 
than  a  humorist.  His  work  shows  high  literary 
quality,  the  quality  that  appears  in  first  rate  novels. 
.  .  .  He  has  done  something  which  many  popular 
novelists  have  singularly  failed  to  accomplish  .  .  . 
he  has  created  real  character." 

He  has  done  more  than  this :  He  has  done  what 
innumerable  first  or  second  rate  literary  men  and 
women  have  failed  and  will  fail  to  do  till  the  end 
of  time.  He  has  immortalized  an  epoch  and  a  locale 
in  the  South-western  Mississippi  Valley  portraits  of 
Tom  Sawyer,  Huck  Finn,  Pudd'nhead  Wilson  and 


10   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

other  characters  in  these  three  books.  Professor 
Phelps  calls  the  first  two  of  these  novels,  prose  epics 
of  American  life. 

He  goes  on  further  to  differentiate :  "  The 
creator  of  Tom  exhibited  remarkable  observation, 
the  creator  of  Huck  showed  the  divine  touch  of  the 
imagination :  Tom  is  the  American  boy.  He 
is  smart  ...  he  displays  abundant  promise  of  fu 
ture  success  in  business.  Huck  is  the  child  of  na 
ture,  harmless,  sincere  and  crudely  imaginative. 
His  reasonings  with  Jim  about  nature  and  about 
God  belong  to  the  same  department  of  natural  the 
ology  as  that  illustrated  by  Browning's  Caliban. 
The  night  on  the  raft  when  these  two  creatures  look 
aloft  at  the  stars  and  Jim  reckons  the  moon  laid 
them  is  a  case  in  point.  .  .  .  Nearly  all  healthy 
boys  enjoy  reading  Tom  Sawyer.  Yet  it  is  impos 
sible  to  outgrow  the  book.  .  .  .  The  other  master 
piece  is  not  really  a  child's  book  at  all.  ...  It  is  a 
permanent  picture  of  a  certain  period  in  American 
history;  .  .  .  Mark  Twain  gives  us  both  points  of 
view;  he  shows  us  the  beautiful  side  of  slavery,  for 
it  had  a  wonderfully  beautiful  patriarchal  side  —  he 
shows  us  also  the  horror  of  it. 

"  The  living  dread  of  the  negro  that  he  would  be 
sold  down  the  river,  has  never  been  more  vividly  rep 
resented  than  when  the  poor  woman  in  Pudd'nhead 
Wilson  sees  the  water  swirling  against  the  snag  and 
realizes  that  she  is  bound  the  wrong  way.  That  one 
scene  makes  a  peculiar  impression  on  the  reader's 
mind  and  counteracts  tons  of  polemics." 

And  again,  briefly,  "  Mark  Twain  may  be  trusted 
to  tell  the  truth,  for  the  eye  of  the  born  caricaturist 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       11 

always  sees  the  salient  point.  .  .  .  Mark  Twain  is 
through  and  through  American  ...  is  our  great 
democrat.  Democracy  is  his  political,  social  and 
moral  creed.  His  hatred  of  snobbery,  affectation 
and  assumed  superiority  is  total.  His  democracy 
has  no  limits ;  it  is  bottomless  and  far-reaching." 

So  much  for  Professor  Phelps.  To  come  back  to 
Mr.  Howells  again,  in  an  estimate  written  a  good 
many  years  ago,  "  There  is  nothing  lost  in  literary 
attitudes,  in  artificial  '  dialect.'  Mark  Twain's  hu 
mor  is  as  simple  and  direct  as  the  statesmanship  of 
Lincoln  and  the  generalship  of  Grant.  .  .  .  When  I 
think  how  purely  and  wholly  American  it  is  I  am  a 
little  puzzled  at  its  minor  exceptions. 

"  We  are  doubtless  the  most  thoroughly  homo 
geneous  people  that  have  ever  existed  as  a  great  na 
tion.  ...  In  another  generation  or  two  perhaps  it 
will  be  different ;  but  as  yet  the  average  American 
is  the  man  who  has  risen ;  he  has  known  poverty  and 
privation,  and  now  in  his  prosperity  he  regards  the 
past  (his  own  and  the  world's)  with  a  large  pitying 
amusement ;  he  is  not  the  least  ashamed  of  it ;  he 
does  not  feel  that  it  characterizes  him  any  more  than 
the  future  does. 

"  Our  humor  springs  from  this  multiform  experi 
ence  of  American  life.  It  is  not  of  a  class,  for  a 
class  ...  its  conventions,  if  it  has  any,  are  all  new 
and  of  American  make.  When  it  mentions  hash  we 
smile  because  we  have  each  somehow  known  the  cheap 
boarding-house  or  restaurant  .  .  .  the  introduction 
of  the  lightning-rod  man  or  book  agent,  establishes 
our  relation  with  the  humorist  at  once,  ...  I  sup 
pose  that  Mark  Twain  transcends  all  other  hu- 


12   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

morists  in  the  universal  qualities  —  there  is  a  poetic 
lift  in  his  work  even  when  he  permits  you  to  recog 
nize  it  as  something  satirized.  .  .  .  There  is  always 
the  touch  of  nature  .  .  .  the  companionship  of  a 
spirit  that  is  at  once  delightfully  open  and  deli- 
ciously  shrewd. 

"  Elsewhere  I  have  tried  to  persuade  the  reader 
that  his  humor  is  at  best  the  foamy  break  of  the 
strong  tide  of  earnestness  in  him.  His  powers  as  a 
story  teller  he  proved  in  Tom  Sawyer  and  The 
Prince  and  the  Pauper.  ...  I  can  think  of  no 
writer  living  who  has  in  the  same  degree  the  art  of 
interesting  the  reader  from  the  first  word." 

Mark  Twain  has  done  more  than  all  this.  He  has 
lightened  our  hours  of  stagnation  and  spiritual  ebb 
with  the  jumping  frog  of  Calaveras,  with  the  episode 
of  Peter  and  the  pain  killer,  with  his  wrestlings  with 
the  German  language  and  other  tales  of  travel  at 
home  and  abroad,  following  the  Equator  and  the 
more  customary  transatlantic  tracks.  According  to 
Mr.  Howells,  writing  while  The  Gilded  Age,  both 
as  book  and  play,  was  still  a  recent  memory,  he  had 
a  large  share  in  the  production  of  the  most  success 
ful  American  play  up  to  date. 

He  has  created  characters  immortal  in  literature. 
Through  them  he  has  immortalized  an  epoch;  and 
he  has  made  them  voices  of  a  new  world  gospel  of 
freedom  and  fair  play,  of  charity  and  humor,  of  the 
most  simple  and  direct  appreciation  of  the  every-day 
things  of  our  workaday  life,  and  the  commonest 
and  most  precious  heritage  of  us  all. 

This  spirit  speaks  in  all  his  works.  It  makes 
The  Prince  and  the  Pauper,  dedicated  to  two  of 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       13 

his  daughters  while  still  children,  the  best  book 
for  girls  and  boys  alike,  ever  written  in  America. 
It  irradiates  and  inspires  the  pages  of  his 
Jeanne  d'Arc;  it  speaks  most  to  the  point,  most 
searchingly,  most  uncompromisingly  and  most  poig 
nantly  in  A  Connecticut  Yankee  in  King  Arthur's 
Court. 

Qf  this  book  Mr.  Howells  has  said :  "  Since  Don 
Quixote  there  has  been  nothing  to  compare  with 
The  Connecticut  Yankee.  .  .  .  At  any  moment  the 
scene  amuses,  but  it  is  all  the  time  an  object  les 
son  in  democracy.  .  .  .  Here  he  is  that  Connecti 
cut  man,  foreman  of  one  of  the  shops  in  Colt's  pistol 
factory  and  full  ...  of  the  invention  and  self-sat 
isfaction  of  the  nineteenth  century  at  the  court  of 
the  mythic  Arthur.  He  is  promptly  recognized  as 
a  being  of  extraordinary  powers,  and  becomes  the 
King's  right  hand  man  with  the  title  of  the  Boss. 
.  .  .  He  starts  a  daily  paper  in  Camelot,  he  tor- 
pedos  a  holy  well.  ...  It  all  ends  with  the  Boss' 
proclamation  of  the  Republic  after  Arthur's  death 
and  his  destruction  of  the  whole  chivalry  of  Eng 
land  by  electricity.  .  .  .  Arthur  has  his  moments 
of  being  as  fine  and  high  as  the  Arthur  of  Lord 
Tennyson.  .  .  .  This  book  is  in  its  last  effect 
the  most  matter  of  fact  narrative,  for  it  is  always 
true  to  human  nature,  the  only  truth  possible,  the 
only  truth  essential  to  fiction.  .  .  .  We  must  all  rec 
ognize  him  here  as  first  of  those  that  laugh,  not 
merely  because  his  fun  is  unrivaled;  but  because 
there  is  a  force  of  right  feeling  and  clean  thinking 
in  it  that  never  got  into  fun  before  except  in  The 
Bigelow  Papers" 


14   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Very  early  in  the  book,  published  in  1889,  Mark 
Twain  strikes  the  key-note  of  fifty-three  years  of 
American  simple  living  and  high  thinking.  "  Any 
kind  of  royalty  howsoever  modified,  any  kind  of  aris 
tocracy  however  pruned,  is  rightly  an  insult.  .  .  . 
It  is  enough  to  make  a  body  ashamed  of  his  race  to 
think  of  ...  the  seventh-rate  rich  people  that  have 
always  figured  as  its  aristocracies  .  .  .  the  rest 
were  slaves  in  fact  but  without  the  name;  they  im 
agined  themselves  men  and  freemen,  and  called  them 
selves  so. 

"  The  truth  was  the  nation  as  a  body  was  in ,  the 
world  for  one  object  and  one  only,  to  grovel  before 
king  and  Church  and  noble,  to  slave  for  them,  to 
sweat  blood  for  them,  sweat  that  they  might  be  fed, 
drink  misery  to  the  dregs  that  they  might  be  happy, 
go  naked  that  they  might  wear  silk  and  jewels,  pay 
taxes  that  they  might  be  spared  from  paying  them, 
be  familiar  all  their  lives  with  the  degrading  lan 
guage  and  postures  of  adulation,  that  they  might 
walk  in  pride  and  think  themselves  the  gods  of  this 
world." 

Here  we  may  pause  for  a  moment  to  let  this  pic 
ture  of  England  in  the  third  century  of  its  Christian 
era,  this  seamy" side  of  the  romance  and  fine  distinc 
tion  of  chivalric  and  patrician  pretension,  first  im 
mortalized  by  Mark  Twain  in  world  literature,  focus 
itself  in  its  grim  and  naked  essentials  as  presented 
here. 

After  that  we  may  turn  to  our  own  convention 
ally  Christian  ^America  of  to-day  and  to-morrow, 
and  mark  the  contrast — ^and  the_  likenesses. 

We  are  told  that  we  have  robber  barons,  captains 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       15 

of  industry,  emperors  of  oil  and  beer,  of  steel  and 
coal,  of  beef  and  wool,  and  all  the  prime  necessities 
and  staples  of  human  life  as  we  still  live  it.  We  know 
that  wre  have  special  interests,  millionaire  and  multi 
millionaire  tax  dodgers  and  rebaters.  We  know 
that  we  have  a  rising  cost  of  living  and  a  rising  age 
of  marriage. 

We  know  that  we  have  child  slaves  jn  our  factories 
and  mines,  and  white  slaves  in  our  streets  and  Red 
Light  districts.  We  begin  to  suspect  that  the  story 
of  our  twenty  million  wrage  jdayes  in  our  factories, 
in  our  department  stores,  in  our  banks,  in  our  clerical 
and  business  offices  from  New  York  to  San  Fran 
cisco,  is  something  more  than  a  journalistic  lie. 

We  know  that  the  language  and  postures  of 
adulation  and  of  cynical  or  subtle  corruption  do  not 
represent  a  dead  issue  in  America  to-day.  We  know 
that  our  pressjs  prostituted  and  subsidized  directly 
and  indirectly.  We  know  that  our  literature,  like 
our  journalism,  is  to  a  large  extent  a  literature  of 
lies  and  of  false  pretense,  of  false  values  and  ideals; 
a  literature  like  our  journalism  of  loudness  and  of 
extravagant  impressionism;  an  impressionism  that 
is  at  once  cynically  snobbish  and  brutally  superficial, 
heartlessly  indifferent  and  commercially  debased. 

We  know  this  and  we  stand  for  it.  What  is  more, 
we  pay  for  it,  we  are  taxed  for  it  in  one  way  or  an 
other,  directly  or  indirectly.  We  profit  by  it,  or 
think  wre  do.  We  advertise  and  are  advertised  in  it 
and  through  it,  to  the  world  and  ourselves,  as  a  new 
world  nation  of  white  Chinamen  and^decadent  and 
^undiscriminating  barbarians. 

When  we  are  in  the  mood  for  it,  we  laugh  at  it  all. 


16   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  at  ourselves  as  a  part  of  the  Great  American 
Joke.  Not  so  Mark  Twain.  To  some  extent,  in 
his  old  age,  he  misread  us  and  the  drift  of  condi 
tions  that  had  evolved  beyond  his  grasp  and  that  of 
the  generation  he  spoke  for.  He  developed,  as  Mr. 
Howells  tells  us,  the  theory  of  the  damned  human 
race. 

To  some  extent  he  was  sufficiently  justified  in  this, 
and  in  the^pessimism  which  clouded  and  weakened  the 
last  years  of  his  life.  As  his  wife  and  daughters 
died,  as  the  circle  of  his  older  friendships  contracted, 
he  began  to  follow  the  way  of  all  flesh  —  save  those 
few  who  formerly  by  the  double  happy  accident  of 
good  fortune  and  fitness  of  temperament,  or  the 
many  of  to-day  who  through  the  widening  sweep  and 
scope  of  applied  science  in  modern  human  relations, 
are  able,  through  all  trials  of  flesh  and  spirit,  to  see 
life  steadily  and  to  see  life  whole  till  the  last. 

To  many  the  publication  and  the  perusal  of  his 
autobiography  has  come  as  a  shock  and  as  a  dis 
appointment.  Mr.  Howells  tells  us  that  he  never  j 
succeeded  in  engaging  his  friend  in  anything  ap-  I 
preaching  a  sociological  discussion.  Mark  Twain 
was  too  essentially  a  product  of  his  own  age  —  that 
period  of  American  history  which  began  with  the 
anti-slavery  protest  of  the  Boston  Abolitionists  and 
ended  ingloriously  in  the  anti-imperialist  agitation 
of  the  late  '90's,  when  the  United  States  assumed 
definite  obligations  as  a  world  power  in  both  hemi 
spheres  —  to  find  himself  in  sympathy  or  in  close  in 
tellectual  touch  with  the  period  of  national  expan 
sion  that  followed. 

With  him   the   American   frontier   halted   at   the 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN        17 

Pacific  coast ;  or  at  Hawaii  at  furthest ;  and  the 
meaning  and  purpose  of  the  wider  frontiers  of  to 
day's  science  and  racial  impulse,  and  our  modern 
march  by  machinery  towards  wider  and  better  is 
sues,  was  in  its  broadest  and  highest  aspect  lost  to 
him. 

At  the  same  time  it  stands  written  to  his  eternal 
credit,  that  so  far  as  he  did  see  he  saw  clearly ;  and 
when  he  spoke  for  publication  to  his  own  people  and 
to  all  humanity,  he  spoke  with  no  uncertain  voice. 

In  the  main  what  he  tells  us  below  is  true  to-day, 
as  it  was  two  thousand  years  ago,  when  Augustus 
Caesar  caused  all  the  world  to  be  taxed,  and  a  Child 
was  born  in  a  manger  in  Judea.  For  all  we  can  say 
definitely  pro  or  contra,  it  may  be  as  true,  in  the 
main,  for  the  masses  two  thousand  years  from  now 
on  this  planet.  None  the  less,  we  are  at  liberty  to 
believe  that  in  his  heart  of  hearts,  Mark  Twain  had 
faith  to  the  last  with  Carlyle,  that  "  The  first  of  all 
gospels  is  that  a  lie  cannot  endure  forever."  We 
may  call  it  pardonable  exaggeration  or  literary  color 
in  the  utterance  of  a  fictitious  character,  of  wrhich 
he  himself  was  conscious,  when  he  tells  us : 

"  We  speak  of  nature ;  it  is  folly ;  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  nature,  what  we  call  by  that  misleading 
name  is  merely  heredity  and  environment.  We  have 
no  thoughts  of  our  own,  no  opinions  of  our  own. 
All  that  is  original  in  us  and  therefore  fairly  credit 
able  to  us,  can  be  covered  up  and  therefore  hidden 
with  the  point  of  a  cambric  needle,  all  the  rest  be 
ing  atoms  contributed  by,  and  inherited  from,  a 
procession  of  ancestors  that  stretches  back  a  bil 
lion  of  years  to  the  Adam  clam  or  grasshopper  or 


18   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

monkey,  from  which  our  race  has  been  so  tecliously 
and  unprofitably  developed. 

"  And  as  for  me,  all  that  I  think  about  in  this 
plodding  and  sad  pilgrimage,  this  pathetic  drift  be 
tween  the  eternities,  is  to  look  out  and  humbly  live 
a  pure  and  high  and  blameless  life ;  and  save  that  one 
microscopic  atom  in  me  that  is  truly  me  —  the  rest 
may  land  in  Sheol  and  welcome  for  all  I  care." 

None  the  less  throughout  the  book  this  needle 
point  of  individuality  speaks  for  all  time  and  all 
humanity  as  well  as  for  himself.  In  him  democracy 
and  his  faith  in  it  becomes  a  surgeon's  tool  for  the 
pricking  of  all  inflated  pretensions  and  the  lancing 
of  to-day's  and  to-morrow's  suppurating  and  in 
sufferable  sores. 

Morgan  le  Fay  stabs  her  page  because  he  stumbles 
against  her.  The  Boss,  who  holds  a  larger  power 
of  life  and  death  in  his  hands,  reproves  her  for  the 
murder.  "  '  Crime  '  she  exclaimed,  6  how  thou  talk- 
est!  Crime  forsooth!  Man,  I  am  going  to  pay 
for  him.'  " 

Here  we  may  pause  again  for  the  deadly  parallel. 
Nowadays  we  do  things  with  more  apparent  delicacy 
and  indirection.  Mrs.  Le  Fay  of  Newport  and  New 
York  does  not  stab  her  page  or  her  small  hand-maid 
when  the  child  stumbles  against  her.  She  is  very 
careful  to  see  that  they  do  not.  Any  chance  con 
tact  with  them,  in  trolley  or  subway  car,  in  the 
streets  or  public  play-ground,  in  the  wooded  and 
well-watered  square  miles  of  private  domains  that 
her  husband  or  her  father  has  bought  up  and  fenced 
in,  in  the  house  of  God  (least  of  all),  or  in  her  own 
town  and  country  mansion  or  chateau  would  ap- 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       19 

proximate  a  state  of  promiscuity  and  possible  con 
tagion  equally  unspeakable  and  incredible  for  the 
most  refined  minds  and  the  fine  flower  of  American 
Plutocracy  up  to  date. 

Morgan  le  Fay  murders  her  own  page  with  her 
own  hand  in  her  own  house,  and  says  that  she  is 
willing  to  pay  for  him.  It  is  true  that  she  was  a 
lady  of  highly  dubious  reputation,  in  more  ways  than 
one.  The  Boss  tells  her  bowing,  "  Madam,  your 
people  will  adore  you  for  this."  None  the  less  he 
tells  us,  "  I  meant  to  hang  her  for  it  some  day  if 
I  lived." 

Mrs.  Le  Fay  (of  New  York  and  Newport)  mur 
ders  indirectly  not  one  but  a  dozen  or  a  hundred 
children,  not  once  but  every  year  she  lives,  in  sweat 
shops,  in  department  stores,  in  factories,  in  mines, 
on  the  streets  where  her  motor  passes ;  she  denies 
to  hundreds  more  every  year  the  right  to  be  born 
of  American  parents  under  a  paper  Constitution 
which  proclaims  life,  liberty,  the  pursuit  of  happi 
ness  and  free  and  equal  opportunity  for  all.  Con 
sciously  or  unconsciously  she  pokes  her  jeweled 
fingers  through  it  as  she  fondles  her  pet  dogs ;  and 
we  and  the  children  she  murders  pay  for  it  —  and  we 
do  not  adore  her  for  it ;  though  some  of  us  still 
profess  to  have  our  doubts  about  the  desirability  of 
capital  punishment  —  except  in  the  case  of  negroes 
in  a  race  war,  or  in  the  case  of  any  of  us  who 
commits  the  civic  crime  of  riding  on  railroads  over 
capitalized  and  unguarded  by  that  eternal  vigilance 
which  is  the  price  of  freedom  and  life  itself  for  in 
dividual  and  for  race  alike. 

On  the  whole,  wre  may  go  fairly  far  with  Mark 


20   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Twain  to  look  with  some  reasonable  doubt  on  the 
result  of  our  one  hundred  and  thirty-six  years'  ex 
periment  in  freedom  for  the  masses  that  was  guar 
anteed  on  paper.  We  may  agree  with  him  absolutely 
where  he  says :  "  The  repulsive  feature  of  slavery 
is  the  thing,  not  the  name.  One  needs  but  to  hear  an 
aristocrat  speak  of  the  classes  that  are  below  him 
to  recognize  .  .  .  and  in  but  indifferently  modi 
fied  measure  .  .  .  the  very  air  and  tone  of  the  ac 
tual  slave  holder  .  .  .  the  result  of  the  same  cause 
in  both  cases,  the  .  .  .  old  and  inbred  custom  of 
regarding  himself  as  a  superior  being." 

We  may  be  present  with  him  in  spirit  when  the 
Boss  empties  the  dungeons  that  Morgan  le  Fay  has 
filled  and  sets  free  such  of  her  captives  as  have 
left  in  them  one  spark  of  any  further  capacity  for 
freedom  than  mere  brute  endurance  of  life. 

We  may  or  we  may  not  take  the  parable  to  our 
selves.  We  may  or  may  not  realize  the  Boss'  unfit- 
ness  to  repair  and  re-animate  those  wrecked  and 
wasted  lives.  We  may  or  may  not  decide  on  how 
close  or  how  vast  a  symbolism  Mark  Twain  himself 
was  conscious  of  in  all  this. 

We  may  marvel  at  the  malignity  and  refinement, 
at  the  ingenuity  of  hatred  in  the  chatelaine  who 
causes  one  man  to  be  imprisoned  on  the  edge  of 
the  cliff  where  he  thinks  he  sees  the  successive  fu 
nerals  of  all  but  one  of  his  family  through  a  long 
term  of  years ;  and  at  the  comparative  indifference 
with  which  he  finds  that  they  are  all  alive  still  when 
he  is  at  last  set  free. 

We  can  refuse  to  believe  in  all  this.  We  can  say 
that  we  have  outgrown  it  all  to-day.  We  can  forget 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       21 

or  refuse  to  see  the  intangible  prison  of  one  law  for 
the  rich,  another  for  the  poor,  that  begins  at  the 
nation's  borders  with  the  iniquities  of  our  protec 
tive  tariff  system,  and  dominates  more  or  less  abso 
lutely  the  people  of  forty-eight  free  and  sovereign 
states ;  which  exists,  long  before  he  is  born,  in  the 
life  of  every  American  child  of  the  submerged  tenth, 
or  the  wage  earning  classes,  on  which  the  increased 
cost  of  living  falls  hardest;  and  which  never  looses 
its  grip  on  him  till  the  day  of  his  death,  or  till  he 
rises  above  the  level  of  his  father  and  mother,  or  till 
he  emigrates  from  the  land  or  the  slum  that  gave 
him  birth  and  the  right  of  the  strongest  to  survive 
at  the  expense  of  the  rest. 

We  can  say  that  such  hatred  as  Morgan  le  Fay's 
is  impossible  here  to-day.  We  can  disregard  abso 
lutely  the  blind  greed  and  hatred  of  corporations,  of 
shareholders  and  executive  officers,  against  all  who, 
directly  or  indirectly,  stand  in  their  way,  and  the 
malign  ingenuity  of  corporation  lawyers  in  making 
their  transgressions  judge-and-jury-proof  —  as  ab 
solutely  as  we  disregard  the  suffering  and  injustice 
caused  by  a  strike  of  electricians  in  Paris,  a  famine 
in  China,  a  massacre  of  the  Jews  in  Russia,  or  the 
sufferings  of  the  prisoners  in  this  story  of  Mark 
Twain's,  that  for  the  time  being  may  be  consider 
ably  more  real  and  vital  to  us  in  this  year  of  grace 
and  land  of  freedom  than  the  sufferings  of  our  fel 
low  countrymen  and  the  rest  of  the  world  —  pro 
vided  our  own  pockets  are  not  pinched  and  our  skins 
remain  unpunctured. 

It  is  true  that  there  are  exceptions  to  prove  the 
rule ;  that  science  in  the  medical  profession  and  out 


22   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  it;  and  sociology,  in  the  universities  and  social 
settlements,  in  the  public  play-grounds  and  recrea 
tion  centers,  in  the  institutional  churches,  in  the 
Boy  Scouts'  movement,  in  the  chemist's  laboratory, 
in  the  inventor's  workshop,  in  the  passing  and  en 
forcement  of  pure  food  and  pure  drug  laws  and  all 
laws  that  deal  directly  and  effectively  with  the  prob 
lems  of  humanity  in  the  mass,  are  literally  and 
progressively  making  the  world  over :  the  human  and 
physical  side  of  it,  the  moral  and  emotional,  the  in 
tellectual  and  material  sides  as  well ;  on  the  broadest 
and  most  lasting  foundations  in  the  individual  and 
in  the  race;  in  ways  that  neither  the  race  nor  the 
individual  dreamed  of  coherently  fifty  years  ago, 
or  in  all  the  centuries  of  civilization  or  of  barbar 
ism  before  that. 

It  is  true  that  Mark  Twain,  like  most  of  the  men 
of  his  generation,  missed  the  point  of  all  this.  His 
fanatic  intolerance  of  vivisection  and  vivisectionists 
may  be  cited  here.  At  the  same  time  he  realized  and 
expressed  in  the  words  of  the  Boss  certain  elemen 
tal  laws  of  economics  that  are  worth  quoting. 

"  A  man  who  hasn't  had  much  experience  and 
doesn't  think,  is  apt  to  measure  a  nation's  prosperity 
or  lack  of  prosperity,  by  the  mere  size  of  the  pre 
vailing  wages ;  if  the  wages  are  high  the  nation  is 
prosperous ;  if  low,  it  isn't.  Which  is  an  error. 

"  It  isn't  what  sum  you  get ;  it's  how  much  you 
can  buy  with  it  that's  the  important  thing;  and  it's 
that  that  tells  you  whether  your  wages  are  high  in 
fact  or  only  in  name.  .  .  .  There's  a  good  many 
curious  things  about  law  and  custom  and  usage  and 
all  that  sort  of  thing  —  and  about  the  drift  and 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       23 

progress  of  human  opinion  and  movement  too. 
There  are  written  laws  —  they  perish ;  but  there 
are  unwritten  laws  —  they  are  eternal.  Take  the 
unwritten  law  of  wages.  It  says  that  they've  got 
to  advance,  straight  through  the  centuries." 

n. 

So  far  we  have  heard  the  assertions  and  the  esti 
mates  of  this  man  and  his  friends,  the  friends  of 
democracy. 

We  have  worked  out  his  own  elementary  politi 
cal  economy,  up  to  the  stage  of  the  political  econ 
omy  that  used  to  be  taught  in  our  schools  and  col 
leges  forty  or  fifty  years  ago,  when  the  drift  of  the 
law  of  wages  was  regarded  chiefly  as  a  problem  in 
applied  mathematics,  an  arbitrary  law  of  social  phy 
sics  like  the  law  of  rent ;  when  our  elementary  social 
consciousness  was  crudely  expressed  in  unenforceable 
Blue  Laws,  in  sentimental  proclamations  on  paper 
of  the  rights  of  man,  and  by  force  of  arms  at  a 
pinch ;  when  the  practical  working  out  of  these 
concepts  in  the  lives  of  the  practical  American  man 
or  woman  of  the  generation  of  Mark  Twain  and 
Mr.  Howells  was  the  condition  and  social  aspira 
tion  of  the  climber,  the  strenuous  hustler  and  un 
relenting  striver  for  success  under  a  deficient  theory 
of  free  competition,  with  the  odds  on  the  man  who 
forcibly  controlled,  and  the  woman  who  advertised 
by  the  most  lavish  spending,  the  greatest  aggregate 
of  capital;  when  our  democratic  creed,  cynical  or 
humorously  good  natured,  too  often  amounted  to 
this  :  "  Keep  up  with  the  procession  —  get  to  the 
top  and  stay  there  —  and  the  Devil  take  the  hind- 


24   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

most  —  poor  devils  " ;  and  when  the  evolutionary 
idea  of  the  modern  nation  as  a  social  and  biologic 
organism  that  reacts  on  its  environment  progres 
sively,  and  fits  itself  for  survival  and  for  wider  useful 
ness  only  by  a  scientific  observance  of  the  laws  of 
physical  and  moral  health  —  an  organism  where  the 
chronic  malnutrition  or  diseased  state  of  a  consider 
able  part  becomes  progressively  a  menace  and  a 
handicap  to  all  —  was  still  confined  to  the  rninds  of 
a  few  of  the  world's  leading  scientists. 

Apparently  this  vision  of  the  world  of  to-day  and 
to-morrow,  and  the  newer  opportunities  and  obli 
gations  of  its  capitalists  in  thought  and  in  concrete 
wealth,  was  no  more  granted  to  Mark  Twain  than 
it  was  to  the  majority  of  the  American  men  and 
women  who  lived  and  died  in  the  period  ending  with 
the  publication  of  A  Connecticut  Yankee,  and  begin 
ning  some  fifty  years  before. 

Mr.  Howells  tells  us,  "  He  did  not  care  much  for 
money  itself,  but  he  luxuriated  in  the  lavish  use  of 
it ;  and  he  was  as  generous  in  the  use  of  it  as  ever 
a  man  was.  He  liked  giving  it  but  he  commonly 
wearied  of  giving  it  himself.  I  believe  he  found  no 
finality  in  charity,  but  did  it  because  in  its  pro 
visional  way,  it  was  the  only  thing  a  man  can  do." 

There  are  a  good  many  people  in  America  to-day 
whose  point  of  view  in  this  respect  is  about  as 
mediaeval  and  reactionary  as  Mark  Twain's  was. 
They  are  not  confined  to  those  whose  acquisitions 
and  disbursements  are  of  material  wealth  alone. 
Many  of  them  are  people  of  considerable  culture 
and  refinement,  educational  and  intellectual  force. 
Many  of  them  will  tell  you  that  they  are  good  Ameri- 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       25 

cans,  or  that  they  try  to  be,  so  far  as  modern  con 
ditions  will  let  them.  Most  of  this  class  instinc 
tively  range  themselves,  openly  or  unconsciously, 
with  the  classes  against  the  masses.  Out  of  the  full 
ness  of  their  own  culture,  they  dole  out  intellectual 
charity  to  others  (when  the  mood  strikes  them),  so 
far  as  they  find  those  others  fit  for  the  reception 
of  their  preferred  stock  of  artistic  expression  — 
within  their  own  narrow  experience  —  and  through 
their  own  superficial  study  of  the  causes  and  con 
ditions  that  affect  us  all. 

Of  these  Mr.  Henry  Dwight  Sedgwick,  whose 
book  The  New  American  Type,  and  whose  essay 
on  The  Mob  Spirit  in  Literature  sufficiently  char 
acterize  his  point  of  view,  is  typical.  These  peo 
ple  nowadays  do  not  claim  that  they  know  it  all. 
They  do  not  even  pretend  to  literary  or  artistic 
omniscience.  Science  has  widened  their  point  of 
view  to  that  extent.  But  they  do  represent  the 
point  of  view  of  the  Bostonian  literary  Brahmin 
who  believes  that  all  he  or  she  knows  or  feels,  or 
cares  to  know  or  feel,  is  all  that  there  is  worth 
knowing  or  feeling.  Apparently  to  this  critic  the 
literary  product,  the  art  and  tendencies,  of  Miss 
Anne  Douglas  Sedgwick  is  of  more  significance  and 
moment  to  America  in  the  making  than  that  of  Da 
vid  Graham  Phillips  —  to  go  no  further. 

Such  men  and  women  seem  to  have  forgotten,  or 
never  to  have  grasped  the  fact  that  art  of  the  people, 
by  the  people,  for  the  people,  in  the  great  masters 
of  all  art  and  in  the  final  popular  appreciation  of 
them  and  their  works,  is  the  only  art  worth  while  in 
the  long  run,  the  only  art  that  proves  its  evolu- 


26   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

tionary  fitness  to  survive,  and  that  will  continue  to 
prove  it  here  and  hereafter. 

They  have  mistaken  temporary  roughness  and  in 
equality  in  the  mold,  temporary  confusion  and  clut 
tering  of  scaffolding,  temporary  slowness  and  negli 
gible  mistakes  in  the  laying  of  the  foundation  on 
the  broadest  possible  basis  of  culture  and  humanity 
by  the  masses,  of  the  masses,  and  for  the  masses  of 
America,  as  final  indications  of  democracy's  defeat 
in  the  applied  arts  and  sciences,  cultures  and  in 
spirations  of  life. 

'  In  so  far  as  their  ideal  is  microscopic  and  search 
ing  as  regards  crudeness  in  the  national  fiber  and 
defects  in  the  national  psychology,  it  is  worth  con 
sidering.  In  so  far  as  it  is  partial  and  limited  in 
its  application  to  the  wider  national  and  racial  view 
point,  it  is  negligible.  Within  these  limitations  Mr. 
Sedgwick  is  a  fairly  acute  and  significant  critic. 

He  says  of  Mark  Twain :  "  At  the  mention  of 
his  name  the  drift  toward  a  depreciation  of  the 
democratic  influences  in  literature  is  arrested.  De 
mocracy  at  once  takes  the  offensive  and  roundly  as 
serts  itself.  In  his  books  Mark  Twain  has  set 
forth,  and  in  himself  he  embodies,  the  traits,  the 
humors,  the  virtues,  of  a  distinct  people.  This  is 
the  explanation  of  Mark  Twain's  fame.  There  are 
few  things  as  interesting,  as  attractive,  as  instructive, 
as  the  man  who  without  sacrificing  a  jot  of  his  own 
individuality,  stands  out  as  the  type  of  his  country. 
He  has  in  him  one  source  at  least  of  the  fascina 
tion  that  a  great  work  of  art  possesses,  the  embodi 
ment  of  the  type  in  the  individual." 

This  is  all  very  well  as  far  as  it  goes.     But  Mr. 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       27 

Sedgwick  misses  the  essential  point,  as  critics  of 
his  type  and  class  are  bound  to  miss  it:  that  Mark 
Twain  embodies  and  typifies  not  America  alone,  but 
humanity  at  large, —  up  to  the  late  nineteenth  and 
early  twentieth  century ;  up  to  the  new  era,  the  mod 
ern  Renaissance  and  Reformation,  the  new  heavens 
and  the  new  earth,  that  science  and  the  campaign 
of  education  generally,  the  muck-rate  magazines, 
to  be  specific  among  other  forces  that  Mr.  Sedg 
wick  and  his  fellow  Brahmins  apparently  have 
neither  use  for,  nor  comprehension  of,  are  making 
for  the  classes  and  the  masses  both  in  America  and 
in  the  rest  of  the  modern  world.  It  is  not  enough 
for  Mr.  Sedgwick  to  say  of  Mark  Twain  that  "  the 
genius  of  America  guided  him  through  life,"  or 
that  "  we  know  his  high  character,  his  courage, 
his  sense  of  duty,  his  energy,  his  patience,  his  kindli 
ness,  his  chivalry,  his  adventurous  temperament,  and 
his  morality ;  and  we  feel  a  sense  of  satisfaction  to 
think  that,  fall  as  far  behind  and  below  as  most 
of  us  do,  he  is  the  type  to  which  most  of  us 
belong." 

It  is  not  enough  that  he  discriminates  sanely  when 
he  says  of  Mark  Twain's  Joan  of  Arc:  "He  is 
not  a  professed  historian.  His  Joan  of  Arc  is 
an  expression  of  noble  enthusiasm.  Here  we  find 
our  self-confident  American  impatient  with  half 
tones,  shadows,  uncertainties.  To  Mark  Twain,  the 
story  of  Joan  is  not  the  resultant  of  many  forces 
working  together,  pushing  from  many  points,  all 
self-asserting  but  subservient  to  the  final  accom 
plishment,  those  antagonistic  as  necessary  to  her 
beauty  as  those  that  directly  support  her;  to  him 


28   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  story  is  a  miracle  of  glory  on  a  scaffold  of  bad 
ness." 

In  other  words,  Mark  Twain  has  not  succeeded 
here,  with  the  labored  patience  of  the  literary  artist, 
in  creating  an  illusive  atmosphere  of  the  mediaeval 
France  of  the  fourteenth  century,  of  her  English  and 
Burgundian  invaders  and  pillagers,  and  of  the  French 
and  Italian  autocracy  of  ecclesiasticism  that  pulled 
the  wires  and  swayed  the  issues  on  either  side,  behind 
the  scenes  and  before  them,  to  the  Maid's  final  defeat 
and  death.  She  is  not  shown  as  a  product  of  evo 
lution  toward  democracy's  final  triumph,  like  the 
forces  that  suppressed  her. 

Mr.  Howells  sees  this  in  part  when  he  tells  us :  "I 
suspect  that  his  armor  is  of  tin,  that  the  castles  and 
rocks  are  of  pasteboard,  that  the  mob  of  citizens  and 
of  soldiers  who  fill  the  air  with  the  clash  of  their  two 
up  and  two  down  combats  have  been  hired  at  so 
much  a  night.  ...  A  very  jolly  thing  about  it,  and 
a  true  thing,  is  the  fun  that  her  people  got  out  of 
the  affair.  It  is  a  vast  frolic  in  certain  aspects,  that 
mystical  mission  of  the  inspired  Maid,  and  Joan  her 
self  is  not  above  having  her  laugh  at  times." 

It  may  not  be  a  vast  frolic,  but  Mark  Twain  has 
made  us  see  that  life  in  fourteenth  century  France 
was  not  all  unmixed  shadow  and  unmitigated  hell  for 
children  and  for  grown-ups  both.  He  is  artist 
enough  to  give  us  the  effect  of  contrast,  to  develop 
the  lighter  sides  of  his  theme  before  working  up  to 
the  black  horror  at  the  end.  More  than  this,  Mark 
Twain,  with  his  usual  directness,  has  struck  at  the 
heart  of  the  whole  matter.  He  has  shown  us  the 
heart  of  childhood,  and  the  maiden  soul  of  France 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       29 

and  of  all  humanity,  led  by  visions  and  sustained  by 
an  ideal  that  perishes  not ;  overcoming,  while  its  hour 
lasts,  greed  and  hatred,  licentiousness  and  abject  in 
difference,  the  lust  of  power  that  fattens  on  the 
world's  wretchedness,  and  the  cynicism  that  holds  it 
self  secure  and  aloof  from  the  rest  of  the  world.  He 
has  shown  us  the  rise  and  fall  of  a  reform  movement 
in  French  politics,  and  the  inevitable  loss  of  faith 
and  of  fervor  that  culminates,  when  this  unorganized 
reform  wave  has  reached  its  limit,  in  the  shameful 
abandonment  and  betrayal  of  its  leader  to  the  or 
ganized  powers  that  prey. 

So  it  was  in  the  days  of  Gethsemane  and  of  Cal 
vary.  So  it  always  will  be  as  long  as  it  is  expe 
dient  that  one  man  or  one  woman  shall  die  for  the 
people  and  shall  rise  again  enthroned  forever  in  the 
deathless  memory  of  all  mankind. 

Truth  stands  on  the  scaffold  to-day,  and  toils  in 
its  shadow  much  as  it  did  in  the  days  before  the  Civil 
War  when  Lowell  wrote,  or  in  the  dark  ages  when 
the  Maid  led  her  armies.  Wrong  is  on  the  throne 
in  twentieth  century  America  as  it  was  in  the  year 
when  the  fagots  were  lighted  in  a  certain  square 
in  Rouen,  or  the  year  when  the  cross  was  raised  on 
a  certain  hill  outside  Jerusalem. 

The  world  is  both  better  and  worse  now  than  it 
was  then,  as  a  strong  man  who  is  far  from  a  saint 
and  not  altogether  a  devil  is  both  better  and  worse 
than  the  average  growing  boy. 

One  thing  insurgent  literature,  starting  with  the 
Old  Testament  prophets  and  the  Gospels,  and  insur 
gent  humanity  everywhere  have  won,  and  hold  se 
curely  through  the  centuries.  Evil  may  do  evil  still 


30       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

on  a  larger  and  more  wholesale  scale  than  ever.  It 
does  not  raise  its  scaffolds;  it  does  not  make  its 
martyrs  in  the  open  as  it  once  did  five  hundred  or 
nineteen  hundred  years  ago. 

And  it  is  to  men  like  Mark  Twain,  of  Mark  Twain's 
type,  of  Mark  Twain's  courage  and  directness  of 
vision,  of  Mark  Twain's  intolerance  of  evil,  of  cruelty 
and  of  sham,  of  every  invasion  and  perversion  of 
truth  —  to  men  of  Mark  Twain's  democracy  and 
Mark  Twain's  racial  inheritance  —  that  the  world 
to-day  owes  most,  and  of  whom  America  and  the 
world  expect  most,  in  the  world's  battle  for  freedom 
and  the  square  deal  now  and  forever. 

There  is  another  side  of  Mark  Twain's  life  and 
personality  as  a  pioneer  of  the  days  that  are  past 
that  we  cannot  afford  to  forget.  It  may  be  epito 
mized  in  the  following  quotation  from  Life  on  the 
Mississippi.  "  The  face  of  the  water  became  a  won 
derful  book  ...  a  book  that  was  a  dead  language 
to  the  uneducated  passenger,  but  which  told  its  mind 
to  me  without  reserve,  delivering  its  most  cherished 
secrets  as  clearly  as  if  it  uttered  them  with  a  voice. 

"  And  it  was  not  a  book  to  be  read  once  and  thrown 
aside,  for  it  had  a  new  story  every  day.  Through 
out  the  long  twelve  hundred  miles  there  was  never  a 
page  that  was  void  of  interest,  never  one  that  you 
could  leave  unread  without  loss,  never  one  that  you 
would  want  to  skip,  thinking  you  could  find  higher 
enjoyment  in  some  other  thing. 

"  There  was  never  so  wonderful  a  book  written  by 
men,  never  one  whose  interest  was  so  absorbing,  so 
unflagging,  so  sparklingly  renewed  with  every  pe 
rusal. 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       31 

"  The  passenger  who  could  not  read  it  was  charmed 
with  a  peculiar  sort  of  faint  dimple  on  its  surface  (on 
the  rare  occasions  when  he  did  not  overlook  it  alto 
gether),  but  to  the  pilot  that  was  an  italicized  pas 
sage;  indeed  it  was  more  than  that,  it  was  a  legend 
in  the  largest  capitals,  with  a  string  of  shouting  ex 
clamation-points  at  the  end  of  it;  for  it  meant  that 
a  wreck  or  a  rock  was  buried  there,  that  could  tear 
the  life  out  of  the  strongest  vessel  that  ever  floated. 

"  It  is  the  faintest  and  simplest  expression  the 
water  ever  makes  and  the  most  hideous  to  the  pilot's 
eye  ...  a  day  came  when  I  began  to  cease  from 
noting  the  glories  and  the  charms  which  the  moon 
and  the  sun  and  the  twilight  wrought  on  the  river's 
face ;  another  day  when  I  ceased  altogether  to  notice 
them.  Then  if  that  sunset  scene  had  been  repeated, 
I  should  have  commented  on  it  after  this  fashion : 

"  6  This  sun  means  that  we  are  going  to  have  wind 
to-morrow,  that  floating  log  means  that  the  river  is 
rising  .  .  .  that  silver  streak  in  the  shadow  of  the 
forest  is  the  "  break  "  of  a  new  snag,  .  .  .  that  tall 
dead  tree  with  a  single  living  branch  is  not  going  to 
last  long,  and  then  how  is  a  body  ever  going  to  get 
through  this  black  place  at  night  without  the  friendly 
old  landmark?  '  No,  the  romance,  the  beauty,  were 
all  gone  from  the  river.  All  the  value  any  feature 
of  it  had  now  was  the  amount  of  usefulness  it  could 
furnish  towards  compassing  the  safe  piloting  of  a 
steamboat." 

There  is  a  clarity  and  a  distinction  about  the  Eng 
lish  and  the  thought  of  most  of  this  that  is  hard  to 
match,  just  as  there  is  a  clarity  and  distinction  about 
the  life  and  the  character  of  the  author  that  we 


32   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

must  look  far  to  find  the  fellow  of  in  twentieth  cen 
tury  America. 

Mark  Twain,  like  most  of  our  own  great  men,  like 
most  of  the  great  men  of  all  times  that  the  world 
remembers  longest,  was  above  and  beyond  common 
humanity,  chiefly  in  virtue  of  the  essential  largeness 
and  simplicity  of  his  interpretation  of  life  and  of  the 
work  that  remains  to  bear  witness  to  that  interpreta 
tion.  Largeness  and  simplicity  in  his  case  is  demo 
cratic  and  American,  as  it  is  of  all  time  and  of  all 
humanity  in  the  best  and  highest  sense. 

Such  simplicity,  such  directness  in  his  case,  is  by 
no  means  as  commonplace,  as  utterly  devoid  of 
subtlety  and  richness  of  meaning  as  the  superficial  and 
the  unschooled  are  wont  to  imagine.  It  is  the  higher 
simplicity  which  is  the  simplicity  of  humanity  at 
large  and  in  the  mass  forever,  that  wears  away  or 
overruns  all  obstacles  in  the  course  of  the  centuries ; 
that  fuses  and  sublimates  the  indeterminate  sources  of 
wealth  and  strength,  and  makes  them  elements  in 
the  end  of  the  one  eternal  purpose  it  was  put  here 
on  earth  to  perform.  It  is  like  the  flow  of  the  great 
river  whose  pages  he  has  pictured  for  us. 

Near  that  river  he  was  born.  On  its  waters, 
through  its  varying  currents,  the  larger  lessons 
of  his  life  came  to  him  till  he  learned  to  read 
the  hearts  of  men  and  of  children  as  he  learned  to 
read  the  face  of  the  waters.  Of  women  he  knew 
and  cared  to  know  comparatively  little.  The  type 
that  appealed  to  him  most,  as  to  the  other  Pio 
neer  fathers  of  his  generation  and  breed,  was  the 
simple  and  direct  type  that  had  its  spiritual  kinship 
with  him  and  with  the  Maid  herself.  One  other  such 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       33 

he  epitomizes  in  the  mouth  of  Huck  Finn.  "  She 
had  the  most  grit  of  any  woman  I  ever  seen.  .  .  . 
She  would  have  prayed  for  Judas  himself." 

Mark  Twain  for  all  his  wanderings,  for  all  his  long 
residence  abroad  after  the  year  1890,  was  essentially 
a  home  body.  He  had  his  own  women  folk,  his  own 
wife  and  daughters,  as  he  had  his  own  homes  where 
his  soul  took  root.  And  when  the  last  and  nearest 
of  these  died,  he  died  too.  No  one  can  read  the  lines 
written  immediately  after  the  death  of  his  daughter 
Jean,  and  published  later  in  the  North  American  Re 
view,  without  seeing  how  his  last  hold  on  life  loosened, 
and  his  last  interest  on  earth  became  in  truth  dust 
and  ashes. 

Human  nature  at  its  best,  as  we  know  it,  has  its 
inevitable  limitations  of  age  and  partial  discern 
ment.  If  Mark  Twain  had  been  a  man  of  another 
type ;  if  his  beliefs  and  affections  had  been  less  insep 
arably  rooted  in  their  narrowness  and  intensity;  he 
might  have  been  alive  to-day,  and  more  or  less  hon 
ored  in  his  survival,  as  the  world  honors  or  fails  to 
honor  those  who  hold  the  mirror  to  it. 

If  he  had  been  more  of  a  psychologist,  more  of  a 
portrait  painter  after  the  manner  of  certain  lady 
novelists  and  of  Mr.  Robert  W.  Chambers,  he  might 
have  analyzed  more  or  less  mercilessly  the  modern 
American  woman  of  whom  we  are  least  proud,  the 
type  that  advertises  us  at  home  and  abroad  most 
loudly  and  most  extravagantly;  and  he  might  have 
set  her  off  more  effectively  than  our  most  widely 
read  American  novelists  have  done  or  tried  to  do, 
by  contrast  with  the  type  of  women  that  he  did 
know  and  did  love,  and  who  exist  to-day  as  women 


34   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  the  type  of  Jane  Addams  and  of  ClaraL  Barton, 
or  of  the  wives  and  mothers  of  most  of  our  great 
men,  from  Grant  and  Lincoln  down  to  the  present 
hour,  to  give  birth  to  the  Great  Republic's  great 
ideals,  and  to  the  children  and  the  grand-children  that 
shall  secure  them. 

However,  being  such  as  he  was,  the  typical  Amer 
ican  of  his  time,  these  things  did  not  tempt  him  to 
put  his  pen  on  paper;  his  fame  rests  secure  as  it  is; 
American  and  world  literature  may  be  the  poorer  in 
actual  product;  it  remains  the  richer  potentially. 

If  Mark  Twain  had  been  more  of  a  scientist,  as 
science  applies  itself  to-day  to  the  every-day,  work 
aday  life  of  mankind  in  the  mass;  if  he  had  been 
more  of  a  sociologist,  more  of  a  discerning  and  pro 
gressive  patriot,  as  America  is  making  such  patriots 
to-day  —  slowly,  and  with  infinite  pains  and  labors 
by  the  masses,  and  with  an  infinity  of  mistakes  by  all, 
high  or  low,  who  misuse  and  misapply  power  and  op- 
*  portunity  —  then  he  might  have  written  greater 
books  still,  of  even  larger  human  application  and 
great  insight  and  sympathy ;  he  might  have  died  hap 
pier  and  even  more  beloved ;  or  hated,  misrepresented, 
vilified,  hounded  to  his  grave  and  beyond  it,  as  no 
literary  man  and  prophet  of  democracy,  outside  of 
Russia,  ever  has  been  in  modern  times. 

As  it  is,  he  enjoys  the  unique  distinction  of  typify 
ing  his  country  and  his  century  up  to  a  certain  point, 
of  immortalizing  an  epoch  like  himself,  and  of  be 
ing  made  to  recognize  what  such  immortality,  and 
what  the  world  commonly  sees  in  it,  are  worth  to 
day,  before  his  death. 

It  is  said  that  the  gods  are  jealous  of  any  man 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       35 

to  whom  so  much  is  given,  who  wrests  so  much  from 
them.  Certain  it  is  that  the  higher  a  man  or  a  na 
tion  rises  in  the  scale  of  existence  on  this  planet,  the 
more  that  man  or  that  nation  has  to  pay  for  it,  in 
one  way  or  another,  sooner  or  later.  Certain  it  is 
that  the  few  last  years  of  Mark  Twain's  life  were  in 
many  ways  a  tragedy,  relieved  by  few  gleams  of 
hope. 

Certain  it  is  that  none  the  less  he  remained,  to 
the  last,  a  free  man,  born  and  bred  of  a  people  once 
free,  of  a  nation  that  won  the  last  great  war  for 
freedom  in  modern  history  —  to  the  last  an  inveter 
ate  foe  of  tyranny  and  corruption,  of  monopoly  and 
of  special  privilege,  of  cruelty  and  of  lies  in  every 
form  which  the  machinery  of  government  and  of  in 
grained  prejudice  and  superstition  hangs  on  the 
necks  of  high  and  low  alike. 

This  has  been  exemplified  already  in  various  ex 
tracts  from  his  books.  One  extract  more  from  his 
speech  made  before  the  organization  committee  of 
the  Order  of  Acorns  in  New  York  City,  published 
shortly  afterwards  in  the  November  number  of  the 
North  American  Review,  1901,  will  recall  to  many 
what  they  would  not  willingly  forget ;  and  will  define 
the  man's  temper  and  his  public  spirit  unmistakably. 

Here  he  draws  a  parallel,  destined  to  become  his 
toric,  between  Warren  Hastings'  misrule  in  India 
and  Tammany's  in  New  York.  He  uses  the  words 
of  Edmund  Burke  to  denounce  Croker  and  Tammany, 
as  Burke  denounced  Hastings  and  East  Indian  mis 
rule.  He  tells  us :  "  The  Calcutta  Tammany  — 
like  our  own  Tammany  —  had  but  one  principle,  one 


36   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

policy,  one  moving  spring  of  action  — -  avarice, 
money  lust.  So  that  it  got  money  it  cared  not  a  rap 
about  the  methods.  It  was  always  ready  to  lie,  forge, 
betray,  steal,  swindle,  cheat,  rob ;  and  no  promise,  no 
engagement,  no  contract,  no  treaty  made  by  its  Boss 
was  worth  the  paper  it  was  printed  on  or  the  pol 
luted  breath  that  uttered  it.  Is  the  parallel  still 
exact?  It  seems  to  me  to  be  twins." 

It  seems  to  me  that  if  we  draw  another  parallel, 
still  more  modern,  and  for  "  our  own  Tammany  " 
read  "  our  own  System,"  we  have  still  another  family 
likeness  in  the  long  history  of  Anglo-Saxon  and 
American  aggression  and  fraud  that  can  give  us  no 
just  cause  for  national  or  individual  pride. 

It  is  well  that  we  should  not  forget  these  words  of 
Mark  Twain's  nor  those  that  follow.  "  The  most 
of  us  know  no  Hastings  but  Macaulay's,  and  there  is 
good  reason  for  that.  When  we  try  to  read  the  im 
peachment  charge  against  him  we  find  that  we  cannot 
endure  the  pain  of  the  details.  They  burn,  they 
blister,  they  wrench  the  heart,  they  drive  us  out  of 
ourselves.  .  .  .  We  realize  that  Tammany's  (the 
System's)  fundamental  principle  is  monopoly  — 
monopoly  of  office;  monopoly  of  the  public  feed- 
trough  ;  monopoly  of  the  black-mail  derived  from  pro 
tected  gambling  hells ;  protected  prostitution-houses, 
protected  professional  seducers  of  country  girls  for 
the  New  York  prostitution  market,  and  all  that ; 
monopoly  all  around,  '  in  some  sense  or  other.'  .  .  . 
We  know  (if  Edmund  Burke  were  here  in  New 
York  to-day)  that  he  would  paraphrase  his  majestic 
impeachment  of  Warren  Hastings  and  say  to  the 
voters  of  New  York  (America) — 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       37 

"  *  We  know  that  we  can  commit  safely  this  great 
metropolis  (nation)  into  your  hands. 

"  '  Therefore  it  is  with  confidence  that,  ordered  by 
the  people  I  impeach  this  man  (these  men  "  higher 
up  ")  of  high  crimes  and  misdemeanors.  I  impeach 
him  in  the  name  of  the  people  whose  trust  he  has 
betrayed. 

"  '  I  impeach  him  in  the  name  of  all  the  people  of 
America  whose  national  character  he  has  dishonored. 

"  '  I  impeach  him  in  the  name  and  by  virtue  of  those 
eternal  laws  of  justice  which  he  has  violated. 

"  '  I  impeach  him  in  the  name  of  human  nature  it 
self,  which  he  has  cruelly  outraged,  injured  and  op 
pressed  in  both  sexes,  in  every  age,  rank,  situation 
and  condition  of  life.'  ' 

All  other  things  aside,  this  is  journalism,  and 
journalism  of  a  very  high  order,  such  as  one  sel 
dom  sees  in  the  press  of  New  York  nowadays.  It  is 
the  kind  of  journalism  for  which  the  demand  now 
adays  is  unrepresented  or  spasmodic.  It  is  so  imme 
diately  and  adequately  to  the  point,  that  one  wonders 
instantly  why  no  one  had  thought  to  draw  the  same 
parallel  before.  It  is  true  that  the  calling  of  a  jour 
nalist  in  New  York  nowadays  does  not  demand  as  es 
sential  part  of  its  equipment  any  practical  acquaint 
ance  with  the  writings  of  Macaulay  and  the  other 
great  English,  American  and  world  classics  that  deal 
with  the  concrete  facts  of  history  and  evolution  in 
their  relation  to  the  eternal  principles  of  right  and 
wrong,  of  destructive  and  constructive  statesmanship 
and  commercial  growth. 

It  is  also  true  that  Mark  Twain  as  a  journalist,  in 
the  intensity  and  uncompromising  quality  of  his  con- 


38   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

victions,  as  well  as  in  his  world  wide  acceptance,  was  a 
man  apart. 

It  is  only  one  more  count  in  the  long  catalogue  of 
lies,  injuries,  treasons,  indecencies,  inadequacies  and 
failures  of  New  York  journalism  during  the  last  fifty 
years  —  the  Wall  Street-inspired  perversion  of  truth 
and  justice  that  has  made  the  metropolitan  press  of 
to-day,  directly  or  indirectly,  prostituted  or  subsi 
dized,  the  most  cynically  immoral  press  in  the  world's 
history  —  that  Mark  Twain  as  a  journalist  has 
never  received  from  it  the  employment,  the  opportun 
ity,  the  encouragement,  the  recognition  of  talents  of 
a  supremely  high  order  like  his  own,  that  journalism 
in  New  York  has  so  long  owed  to  the  metropolis,  to 
the  nation  and  to  itself.  Such  journalism  as  we  have 
there  to-day  will  pay  one  hundred  thousand  to  five 
hundred  thousand  dollars  a  year  gladly  to  the  man 
who  can  increase  the  circulation  of  its  yellowest  yel 
low  journal,  by  the  yellowest  yellow  journal  methods, 
and  hold  the  pace  that  he  has  set.  For  a  man  who 
can  and  will  write  as  Mark  Twain  did,  it  has  offered, 
it  offers,  it  will  offer  nothing. 

There  is  a  certain  type  of  mind  in  America  to-day, 
largely  represented  by  the  newspaper  press  of  New 
York  and  our  other  cities,  to  whom  this  kind  of  thing 
appeals  solely  as  verbal  fireworks  and  erratic  rhetoric. 
Even  at  that,  fireworks  frequently  lift  the  eyes  to  the 
sky  and  the  stars,  if  there  is  any  inclination  and  ca 
pacity  to  look  up ;  and  rhetoric  still  has  its  place,  and 
will  continue  to  have,  in  the  making  of  America. 

It  was  the  rhetoric  of  William  Travers  Jerome  — 
of  his  avowed  and  reiterated  belief  that  you  can't  re 
peal  the  ten  commandments,  and  that  "  Thou  shalt 


DEMOCRACY  AND  MARK  TWAIN       39 

not  steal  "  and  that  "  Thou  shalt  not  commit  adult 
ery  "  or  cause  it  to  be  committed,  by  wholesale  and 
through  machine  organization  —  no  less  than  Ed 
mund  Burke's  and  Mark  Twain's  own  rhetoric  in  the 
latter's  last  important  public  preachment,  that  had 
an  incalculable  effect  in  New  York's  successful  re 
volt  against  Tammany  and  machine  rule  in  the  year 
of  grace  1901. 

It  is  true  that  the  next  revolt,  four  years  later, 
failed,  and  that  during  those  four  years  and  the  rest 
that  followed,  the  grip  of  the  System  and  the  machine 
has  tightened,  superficially,  on  us  all ;  and  that  Amer 
ica,  as  a  nation  and  the  world's  last  great  experiment 
in  democracy,  seems  to  have  less  and  less  to  be  proud 
of  every  year  we  live. 

It  is  true  that  this  sort  of  thing  inevitably  tends  to 
affect  the  lives  of  our  literary  men  and  to  cripple 
and  degrade  their  literary  output.  It  is  true  that 
certain  aspects  of  the  evolutionary  transformation 
through  which  this  country  is  now  passing  helped  to 
sadden  and  embitter  Mark  Twain's  last  years. 

Just  how  far  he  was  able  to  see  that  behind  the  big 
political  boss  stands  the  big  business  boss ;  behind  the 
vote  trust,  the  meat  trust,  the  flour  trust,  the  wool 
trust,  the  oil  trust,  the  steel  trust,  the  money  trust,  the 
news  trust,  the  thought  trust;  just  how  far  he  was 
able  to  forecast  the  commercialization  and  the  falsifi 
cation  of  the  news  columns  of  our  metropolitan  dailies, 
and  the  attempted  increase  in  postage  rates  on  sec 
ond  class  advertising  matter  aimed  at  our  muck-rake 
magazines  —  this  we  shall  never  be  able  to  know. 

All  that  —  his  private  view  of  the  case,  as  he  has 
not  expressed  it  —  concerns  us  comparatively  little. 


40       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

What  does  concern  us  are  the  conditions  which  we 
as  fellow  Americans  of  this  man  have  to  face  here  and 
now. 

What  does  concern  us,  what  we  cannot  afford  to 
forget  and  never  shall,  is  the  spirit  of  the  man  and  of 
the  men  and  women  of  his  generation,  which  is  still 
alive  in  us  and  ours,  all  superficial  and  machine-made 
considerations  to  the  contrary. 

Taken  in  their  bulk,  the  life  and  writings  of  Mark 
Twain,  like  the  life  and  work  of  Lincoln  and  Grant 
and  the  men  nearest  to  these  three,  may  be  regarded 
as  a  permanent  national  asset  beside  which  all  the 
millions  of  Wall  Street  stand  like  the  toy  savings- 
banks  one  gives  to  children  to  play  with. 

Regarded  as  mere  literature  and  works  of  art, 
Tom  Sawyer,  Huck  Finn,  Pudd'nhead  Wilson, 
Joan  of  Arc,  A  Connecticut  Yankee,  remain  not 
alone  as  permanent  contributions  to  world  litera 
ture,  not  merely  as  high  water  marks  of  American 
literary  character  and  American  artistic  achieve 
ment  up  to  date,  not  merely  as  the  older  generation's 
inspiration  and  trumpet  call  to  the  new  in  an  hour 
of  trembling  for  the  purblind  and  weak-hearted,  but 
as  partial  promises  of  the  American  literature  that 
is  yet  to  be,  and  lasting  written  guarantees  and 
charters  of  democracy's  final  triumphant  march  to 
heights  unwon,  undreamed  of,  unsurveyed,  equally  by 
the  men  and  women  of  to-day  and  the  ages  and  the 
literatures  that  have  gone  to  to-day's  making. 


II 

HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE 

"  The  human  machine  is  what  interests  me  most.  .  .  .  Save 
for  three  or  four  big  buildings,  most  of  them  affreux,  it 
(Washington)  looks  like  a  settlement  of  negroes.  You  go 
into  the  Capitol  as  you  would  into  a  railroad  station  ...  no 
functionaries,  no  door-keepers,  no  officers,  no  uniforms,  no 
reservations;  .  .  .  nothing  but  a  crowd  of  shabby  people  cir 
culating  in  a  labyrinth  of  spittoons."  The  Point  of  View, 
1882. 

"' My  figures  are  studied  from  life.  I  have  a  little  menagerie 
of  monkeys  whose  frolics  I  contemplate  by  the  hour.  As  for 
the  cats,  I  have  only  to  look  out  of  the  back  window.  .  .  .  What 
do  you  say  to  my  types,  signore?  Cats  and  monkeys  —  mon 
keys  and  cats  ...  all  human  life  there.' —  He  took  up  the 
little  groups  .  .  .  they  consisted  each  of  a  cat  and  a  monkey, 
fantastically  draped  in  some  preposterously  sentimental  con 
junction.  They  exhibited  a  certain  sameness  of  motive,  and 
illustrated  chiefly  what  in  delicate  terms  may  be  called  gal 
lantry  and  coquetry  .  .  .  they  were  strikingly  clever  and  ex 
pressive  —  I  confess  that  they  failed  to  amuse  me."  The 
Madonna  of  the  Future,  1879. 

THE  attitude  towards  America  and  life  at  large  of 
our  most  misrepresentative  and  un-American  novelist 
of  contemporary  cosmopolitan  life  is  sufficiently  indi 
cated  by  the  first  quotation.  It  is  true  that,  with  his 
usual  indirection,  he  puts  his  own  words  into  the  letter 
of  one  Bostonian  and  expatriate  temporarily  on  this 
side  of  the  Atlantic,  who  is  writing  to  a  sympathetic 
soul  in  Paris. 

It  is  true  that  in  the  same  loosely  novelized  collec 
tion  of  letters,  Mr.  James  tries  to  suggest  the  Ameri- 

41 


42   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

can  point  of  view,  caricatured,  through  a  medium  as 
uninspiringly  evasive  as  the  contents  of  ninety-nine 
per  cent,  of  the  eight  thousand  pages  in  twenty-four 
volumes  collected  in  1909  in  the  New  York  edition  of 
his  novels  and  tales.  Any  superficial  study  of  his 
life  and  work  will  convince  the  earnest  seeker  for  truth 
on  which  side  of  the  Atlantic  his  interests  and  sympa 
thies  have  lain  for  half  a  century  —  and  still  lie. 

The  quotation  from  The  Madonna  of  the  Fu 
ture.,  obviously  directed  against  the  conventional 
Parisian  and  Continental  treatment  of  "  the  eternal 
triangle  "  and  similar  sexual  problems,  has  come  in 
time's  revenges  to  be  a  sufficiently  pointed  character 
ization  of  his  own  later  manner  and  point  of  view,  as 
exemplified  notably  in  The  Sacred  Fount,  and  in 
shorter  selections  of  de-naturalized  fiction  smelling 
of  the  moral  dissecting-room,  such  as  may  be  found  in 
The  Better  Sort  and  The  Finer  Grain. 

Possibly  "  decadent "  is  sufficiently  Transat 
lantic,  sufficiently  vague  in  its  implications,  to  de 
fine  him  sufficiently  for  all  practical  purposes  in  a 
single  word  for  the  vast  majority  of  contemporary 
Americans,  of  both  sexes  and  an  average  amount  of 
culture  and  natural  critical  acumen,  who  for  one 
reason  or  another  —  curiosity,  original  research,  in 
tellectual  and  social  snobbery,  the  power  of  literary 
suggestion,  and  sheer  self  defense  —  have  been  led, 
are  led  to-day  and  may  still  be  led  in  generations  still 
unborn  to  interest  themselves  in  him  and  his  produc 
tions. 

To  suggest  that  he  is,  and  always  has  been,  super 
latively  patronizing  in  his  attitude  towards  the  world 
at  large,  and  towards  all  literary  art  save  the  pro- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          43 

ductions  of  his  own  pen  and  those  of  recognized  mas 
ters  of  his  own  point  of  view,  is  to  venture  no  further 
than  the  titles  already  quoted  and  the  abysmal  dif 
ference  between  pretension  and  achievement  fully 
justify. 

Henry  James  at  his  best  is  a  brilliant  critic  and  an 
incisive  social  observer  and  chronicler,  within  the  nar 
row  range  of  his  own  temperamental  limitations  and 
literary  and  social  instincts.  One  may  call  him  a 
good  critic  gone  wrong  and  be  fairly  within  the 
truth ;  but  even  as  critic  alone,  his  capacity  for  see 
ing  life  (and  art)  solidly  and  seeing  it  whole  is,  to 
say  the  least,  limited. 

Mr.  William  C.  Brownell  has  something  to  say 
about  Mr.  James's  curiously  narrow  critical  and  ap 
preciative  range,  in  time  and  in  method  as  well,  in 
American  Prose  Masters  (Scribner's  '09).  Those 
who  for  one  reason  or  another  are  content  to  study 
in  detail  Mr.  James's  art  and  artistry  as  novelist  and 
critic  both,  will  find  much  that  is  interesting  and  sug 
gestive  in  Mr.  Brownell's  long  and  closely  knit  es 
say. 

Mr.  Brownell  handles  Mr.  James  elaborately  — 
with  gloves  on.  To  my  mind  he  wastes  consider 
able  time  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  literary  pre 
cisian  in  trying  to  prove  or  suggest  just  how  and 
why  Mr.  James  has  developed  his  peculiar  idiosyn 
crasies  of  artistic  and  vital  expression. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  the  average  American 
reader  of  some  education  and  culture,  and  of  more 
brains  and  active  benevolence,  busy  with  a  thousand 
more  vital  interests  at  home  and  abroad,  I  may  ap 
parently  be  about  to  do  the  same  thing. 


44   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Such  men  and  women  may  say,  if  they  care  to  take 
the  time: 

"  Admitting  that  Henry  James  at  his  worst  is  as 
bad  as  you  think  or  would  have  us  think;  admitting 
that  he  may  be,  at  his  best,  at  least  considerably  bet 
ter  than  you  seem  inclined  to  rate  him ;  how  does  this 
all  concern  us? 

"  Why  break,  or  try  to  break,  a  butterfly  on  a 
wheel  for  our  benefit  who  must  read  while  we  run, 
in  trains,  ferry  boats,  trolley  cars  and  on  subway  and 
elevated  platforms?  Why  not  choose  some  novelist 
and  some  subject  of  more  intimate  and  lasting  inter 
est  to  us  all  if  you  hope  in  any  way  to  secure  our 
interest  and  active  cooperation  in  your  main  ob- 
ject?" 

To  this  the  more  obvious  answer  is  that  this  book 
was  not  written  for  busy  people  alone;  the  less 
obvious  one,  that  simian  and  anti-social  pretense  and 
self-sufficiency,  literary  and  journalistic  scandal- 
mongering  and  snobbery,  and  the  purveying  of  false 
ideals  of  culture  and  special  privilege  are  worse  than 
symptomatic:  they  are  epidemic  to-day  in  a  large 
and  increasing  mob  of  Americans  by  birth,  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic.  As  such,  in  their  causes  and 
evolutionary  origins  and  survivals,  and  with  refer 
ence  to  such  twentieth  century  American  civilization 
as  we  have  so  far  evolved,  they  deserve  to  be 
studied  here  to-day  quite  as  much  as  the  qualities 
that  are  their  exact  opposites  and  partial  correct 
ives. 

Henry  James  (plus  the  increasing  class  of  Ameri 
can  women,  briefly  characterized  by  David  Graham 
Phillips  as  possessed  of  the  souls  of  fog  banks,  whose 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          45 

false  prophet  of  sterile  and  reactionary  culture  this 
author  seems  to  be)  is  by  no  means  a  negligible  qual 
ity  in  the  America  of  to-day  and  of  to-morrow. 

And  America  and  the  rest  of  the  world  has  begun 
very  widely  to  recognize  this  fact.  We  can't  afford 
to  break  a  single  butterfly  on  the  wheel  too  often, 
not  even  to  encourage  the  others.  We  can't  pay  too 
much  attention  to  the  withered  leaves  and  the  blighted 
buds  of  the  tree  of  culture  and  of  life  —  without  look 
ing  further  into  the  conditions  and  the  causes  of  the 
insect  pests  and  parasites  that  attack  the  roots  and 
infest  the  trurik  and  branches  of  the  tree  —  if  we  are 
to  initiate  or  carry  forward  progressively  such  a 
sound  policy  of  literary  and  critical  conservation 
in  things  American  as  the  day  and  hour  calls  for. 

If  we  are  to  do  any  really  useful  work  along  lines 
of  moral  and  emotional  conservation,  we  can't  waste 
too  much  time  trying  to  draw  the  comparison  too 
closely  between  Mr.  James  and  the  rest  of  his  "  in 
tensely  "  egotistical  and  microscopic-minded  tribe  and 
the  mosquito.  We  may  merely  remark  in  passing 
that  this  insect  is  intensely  disagreeable  as  an  in 
dividual  whenever  and  wherever  it  insists  on  poking 
its  nose  into  our  nerve  centers  and  the  lingerie  of  our 
private  lives ;  and  that,  as  a  class,  it  becomes  increas 
ingly  dangerous  and  pestilential  as  a  carrier  of 
disease  as  the  world's  population  spreads,  until  the 
progressive  modern  community  is  roused  to  begin  a 
systematic  campaign  for  the  final  rooting  out  of  the 
species  and  its  breeding  places. 

However  far-fetched  and  unjust  to  Mr.  James  as  a 
single  writer  and  literary  snob  and  false  prophet  of 
curiosity  for  the  sake  of  curiosity,  and  of  pretense 


46   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

for  the  pride  of  pretense,  this  comparison  may  seem 
to  some,  the  fact  remains  that  the  method  of  science 
in  all  constructive  and  progressive  modern  criticism 
in  all  the  arts  is  to  go  back  to  the  origins  of  things 
and  to  follow  nature's  own  analogies,  when  no  better 
formula  is  at  hand,  in  the  consideration  of  any  prob 
lem  worth  serious  thought  or  discussion. 

To  understand  just  "Why  is  Henry  James?"  in 
the  slang  of  the  hour,  we  need  not  go  back  farther 
for  the  purposes  of  this  brief  survey,  than  the  last 
three  hundred  years  of  Anglo-Saxon  civilization  in 
New  England. 

Treated  as  an  evolutionary  product  of  the  New 
England  conscience  supremely  misdirected  and  mis 
applied  along  its  own  narrowest  line  of  least  resist 
ance  in  cosmopolitan  society  and  in  hotels  and 
pensions  of  greater  or  less  social  pretensions  in  Eng 
land  and  the  continent,  the  development  of  this  son 
of  a  Swedenborgian  clergyman,  brother  of  a  Harvard 
professor  and  one  of  America's  most  distinguished 
psychologists  —  educated  chiefly  in  France  and  Swit 
zerland,  domiciled  for  the  greater  part  of  his  life  in  or 
near  London,  and  misunderstanding  and  misunder 
stood  by  his  country-men  and  country-women  for 
more  than  half  a  century  —  becomes  an  epic  in 
little  of  human  error  and  intellectual  futility  beside 
which  the  most  elaborately  depressing  of  his  own 
eight  hundred  page  novelizations  subsides  into  com 
parative  insignificance. 

Hardly  even  the  most  minutely  patient  and  pains 
taking  Germanic  critics  could  or  would  find  time  to 
work  through  the  ten  thousand  or  more  close  pages 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          47 

of  Mr.  James'  complete  works,  after  the  severely  ac 
curate  manner  of  modern  scientific  research,  in  the 
hope  of  rousing  the  world  to  listen  to  the  detailed 
result  of  his  investigations. 

The  present  writer  has  no  such  wild  ambitions. 
Such  novels,  tales,  criticisms  and  dramatizations  of 
Mr.  James  as  he  does  mention,  however,  he  does  know 
something  of,  from  more  than  hearsay.  In  effect  he 
claims  the  right  to  generalize,  as  well  as  to  particular 
ize,  constructively  as  well  as  destructively. 

Mr.  James,  like  the  rest  of  us,  deserves  to  be 
studied  first  and  last  as  a  product  or  by-product  and 
partial  factor  of  environment.  As  a  product  or 
by-product  of  several  spiritual  and  intellectual  gener 
ations  of  New  England  old  maids  in  trousers  and 
petticoats,  transplanted  to  foreign  soil  and  forced  to 
adjust  themselves  to  the  changed  conditions  of  their 
environment  with  indifferently  neuter  results,  Mr. 
James  in  the  earlier  years  of  his  career  gave  to  the 
world  a  series  of  human  documents  of  more  or  less 
lasting  value. 

Mr.  Brownell  calls  them  contemporary  sociolog 
ical  studies  of  cosmopolitan  interest. 

This  may  be  to  over-estimate  their  importance  as 
such.  We  have  no  evidence  that  Mr.  James  has  ever 
been  widely  translated,  or  ever  will  be. 

We  may  pause  in  passing  to  pity  the  translator 
of  anything  conceived  in  his  later  manner,  and  note 
such  futilities,  infelicities,  mannerisms  and  perver 
sions  of  an  originally  admirable  and  lucid  natural 
style,  as :  "  She  nevertheless  condescended  fur 
ther  to  mention  ...  he  disingenuously  asked  .  .  . 
she  quite  gloriously  burst  forth  ...  he  drove  it  in- 


48       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

timately,  inordinately  home  ...  he  disposed  of  a 
curtailed  murmur  ...  I  quite  literally  mean  that 
.  .  .  her  lovely  silly  eyes  " —  comparable  only  to  the 
temperamental  or  conscientious  fussiness  of  New  Eng 
land  old  maidenhood  or  the  premature  senility  of  the 
weakly  uninspired  male. 

Doubtless  short  stories  like  Daisy  Miller,  The 
Madonna  of  the  Future,  Mme.  de  Maudes,  The  Last 
of  the  Valerii,  The  Passionate  Pilgrim,  The  Chaper- 
one,  The  Pension  Beaurepas;  novels  like  The 
American,  The  Siege  of  London,  The  Europeans, 
Washington  Square,  and  The  Spoils  of  Poynton; 
later  brief  efforts  like  Mona  Montravers  and  The 
Bench  of  Desolation,  and  intolerably  long  and  diffuse 
dissertations  and  exemplifications  of  Mr.  James'  pe 
culiar  theories  of  intense  personality  and  indirect 
values,  will  continue  to  have  a  certain  lasting  interest 
to  the  literary  antiquarian  and  technical  critic  who 
can  find  time  for  them,  and  to  readers  of  a  certain 
type  of  mind  corresponding  most  closely  to  the  au 
thor's  own. 

Unpartisan  criticism  may  eventually  decide  that 
certain  of  the  literary  products  listed  above,  like 
minor  masterpieces  in  all  the  arts,  are  worthy  of  ex 
amination  in  detail,  and  of  a  permanent  place  in  lit 
erature  per  se,  and  may  determine  for  posterity's 
delectation,  if  not  our  own,  just  how  far  Mr.  James' 
theory  and  practice  has  accelerated  and  retarded  the 
development  of  the  short  story,  the  novel,  the  closet 
drama,  the  volume  of  literary  travel  notes,  and  ra 
tional  literary  criticism  and  appreciation  within 
specialized  literary  limits,  both  in  America  and  else 
where. 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          49 

Sound  literary  criticism,  in  all  ages  since  literary 
criticism  had  a  voice  and  insight  of  its  own,  has 
sooner  or  later  learned  to  view  a  masterpiece  like 
the  Odyssey,  the  (Edipus  Tyrannus,  the  Antigone, 
the  sEneid,  the  Inferno,  the  Paradiso,  Hamlet, 
Macbeth,  King  Lear,  Balzac's  Cousin  Bette,  Thack 
eray's  Vanity  Fair,  Turgenev's  On  the  Eve,  Tolstoi's 
Anna  Karenina,  Zola's  Germinal,  Meredith's  The 
Egotist,  Norris'  The  Octopus,  with  reference  to 
the  epochs  and  the  localities  that  produced  them. 
It  has  learned  to  criticise  the  great  masters,  who  have 
spoken  characteristically  as  the  voices  and  souls  of 
all  these  various  times  and  places,  with  reference  not 
only  to  their  place  technically  in  art,  but  rather 
with  a  view  to  their  attitude  towards  life  and  human 
activity  at  large. 

Just  so  long  as  Mr.  James  himself  and  his  most 
fanatic  admirers  challenge  comparison  with  the 
great  masters  of  all  literature  on  something  like  an 
equal  footing,  it  becomes  the  privilege  and  obliga 
tion  of  every  sincere  and  scientific  critic  to  apply  the 
same  ultimate  standard  of  measuring  up  or  down  to 
him  —  and  inferentially  to  the  disciples  of  fog  bank 
culture  who  claim  through  their  extreme  devotion, 
real  or  apparent,  to  this  author,  to  be  exalted  above 
all  other  literary  standards,  human  and  divine,  and 
to  be  capable  of  interpreting  what  they  presume  to 
tell  us  something  like  ninety-nine  per  cent,  of  the 
human  race,  as  it  exists  to-day,  is  unfit  and  unable  to 
understand  and  enjoy. 

As  to  the  sum  total  of  pure  enjoyment  to  be  had 
from  reading,  more  or  less  leisurely,  any  book 
like  The  Golden  Bowl,  The  Awkward  Age,  The 


50   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Wmgs  of  the  Dove,  or  The  Sacred  Fount,  ninety- 
nine  per  cent,  of  the  human  race  is  probably 
willing  to  waive  the  point.  Science  has  sufficiently 
demonstrated  for  us  the  literal  truth  of  "  what  is  one 
man's  meat  is  another's  poison."  It  does  not  neces 
sarily  demonstrate  my  own  physical,  mental  and 
moral  superiority  to  my  neighbor,  or  vice  versa,  if 
I  prefer  my  own  racial  appreciation  of  rare  tender 
loin  steak,  Chambertin  '89  and  lobster  a  la  Newburg 
(when  I'm  in  the  mood  and  have  the  money  for 
them)  to  his  or  her  vegetarian  ideal  of  Educator 
crackers,  Postum  Cereal  coffee  and  an  assorted  diet 
of  uncooked  fruits  and  nuts.  Similarly  with  our  lit 
erary  tastes  and  predictions,  provided  those  of  both 
are  sincere  and  fit  for  us  in  our  varying  stages  of 
growth. 

Scholastic  literary  criticism  in  America  to-day 
does  not  concern  itself  greatly  with  this  varying 
standard  of  tastes  where  Henry  James  is  to  the  fore. 
Professor  William  P.  Trent  of  Columbia  University, 
in  the  revised  edition  of  his  History  of  American  Lit 
erature,  may  be  taken  as  typical  of  this  point  of  view. 
Condensed  from  a  bare  page  about  Mr.  James  in  a 
volume  that  devotes  many  pages  to  men  that  were 
his  contemporaries  in  and  near  Boston  when  he  saw 
fit  to  abandon  it,  we  have  these  sentences :  "  If  it 
were  necessary  to  describe  Mr.  James  in  one  word, 
that  word  would  be  subtle.  .  .  .  Although  his  style 
has  become  involved  beyond  measure,  he  has  an  audi 
ence  of  intense  admirers.  That  this  audience  is  limi 
ted,  and  that  its  members  are  regarded  with  sympa 
thetic  solicitude  by  their  friends  cannot  be  denied ; — 
and  whatever  we  say  of  Mr.  James'  fiction,  there 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          51 

should  be  but  one  opinion  of  his  exceptional  brilliancy 
as  a  critic." 

Professor  Trent  remains  sufficiently  on  the  fence 
to  state  in  passing  that  Robert  Browning  also  was 
appreciated,  in  the  early  stages  of  his  career,  only 
by  a  limited  circle  of  admirers. 

Professor  Harry  Thurston  Peck,  formerly  of  Co 
lumbia  University  and  editor  of  The  Bookman,  fixes 
Mr.  James'  place  in  the  universe  still  more  felici 
tously.  In  The  Personal  Equation,  1898,  he  says 
—  "  Mr.  Henry  James  no  doubt  is  also  in  his  way  a 
critic  of  life ;  but  his  little  corner  of  observation 
is  so  very  little,  his  lenses  are  so  carefully  adjusted 
to  one  particular  focus,  and  his  instrument  is  so 
obviously  an  opera-glass  and  not  the  telescope  as  to 
make  his  books  the  impressions  of  a  first-nighter 
rather  than  the  accurate  and  cosmic  view  of  a 
sociological  astronomer." 

If  any  reader  needs  further  proof  of  Mr.  James' 
inveterate  tendency  to  ignore  the  real  values  of  life 
in  favor  of  the  artificial  and  theatrical  ones,  he  is  in 
vited  to  turn  to  The  Tragic  Muse  forthwith,  and 
to  observe  how  easily  Professor  Peck  might  rest  his 
case  on  the  testimony  of  this  one  book  alone. 

Amateurish  feminine  criticism  in  the  person  of 
Elizabeth  Luther  Gary  —  also  author  during  the  last 
dozen  years  of  Browning,  Poet  and  Man;  Tenny 
son,  His  Home,  His  Friends  and  His  Work;  Wil 
liam  Morris,  Poet,  Craftsman,  Socialist;  The  Ros- 
settis,  Dante  Gabriel  and  Christina;  Ralph  Waldo 
Emerson,  Poet  and  Thinker;  all  published  at  an 
average  price  of  $3.50  net  "  beautifully  illustrated 
.  .  .  paper  and  typography  superb,"  if  one  of  the 


62   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

largest  New  York  manufacturing  houses  of  books  for 
the  Fog- ridden  are  to  be  fully  relied  on  —  is  not  on 
the  fence  at  all,  though  she  appears  to  affect  a  tem 
porary  attitude  of  broad-minded  non-partisanship  in 
the  first  few  paragraphs  of  her  introductory  chapter. 

Later  in  the  same  section  she  tells  us  that  "  the 
patriot  must  inevitably  welcome,  almost  with  a  sense 
of  pious  gratitude,  a  long  series  of  impressions  made 
upon  a  mind  prepared  to  receive  the  fine,  elusive,  im 
perceptible  seed  of  English  and  European  influences, 
to  nourish  it  with  the  substance  of  a  rich  intelli 
gence,  and  bring  it  to  a  luxuriant  fruitage  of  ripe  re 
flection.  Perhaps  it  is  indeed  necessary  to  belong 
to  the  disinherited  in  order  to  look  on  the  over 
whelming  complicated  social  spectacle  of  London 
with  a  gaze  at  once  interested  and  detached,  .  .  . 
The  novelist  of  manners,  to  use  again  a  phrase  com 
monly  limited  to  half  its  meaning,  is  of  necessity  a 
person  dedicated  to  his  occupation.  .  .  .  What  he 
personally  stands  for  in  his  criticisms,  and  what  he 
indefatigably  acts  upon  in  his  hovels  and  stories  is 
this  simple  and  supreme  idea  of  combining  what  a 
critic  of  painting  would  call  tactil^e_values  with  the 
greatest  possible  amount  of  spiritual  truth.  .  .  . 
This  interrogation  of  the  invisible,  united  to  an  un 
remitting  effort  towards  completeness  of  evocation 
constitutes  his  extraordinary  distinction." 

In  all  this  it  is  possible  that  Mis&JCaxy  thinks  she 
has  a  definite  and  logical  conception  of  what  she  and 
Mr.  James  are  driving  at.  It  is  possible  she  may  be 
perfectly  sincere  in  her  attitude  of  commercially  in 
terpretative  hero-worship.  It  has  been  characteristic 
of  women  in  all  ages  to  worship,  think  they  worship, 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          53 

pretend  they  worship,  and  in  one  way  or  another  to 
exploit  and  be  exploited  by  things  and  people  they 
fail  to  understand. 

Leaving  the  women  to  themselves  and  their  idols 
for  the  time  being,  let  us  put  Mr.  John  C.  Hervey 
on  the  witness-stand  with  reference  to  Mr.  James. 

In  the  Chicago  Evening  Post  weekly  book  re 
view  for  December  9th,  1910,  he  states:  "  When  he 
was  last  '  in  our  midst '  for  a  few  shuddering  fort 
nights,  I  recall  the  loathing  that  he  expressed  at  the 
face  of  the  American  business  man,  '  the  American 
business  face  '  as  he  expressed  it.  The  attitude,  the 
remark,  were  alike  significant.  For  the  typical  Ameri 
can  business  face  —  oftener  than  not  is  an  admirable 
one,  a  face  of  fine  lines  and  superb  contours,  devoid 
neither  of  nobleness  nor  strength.  Possibly  it  is  its 
strength  that  revolts  Mr.  James  —  that  quality  is 
so  remote  from  him  —  when  confronted  with  the 
builder  of  cities  and  controller  of  men.  .  .  .  There 
is  still  another  aspect  of  Mr.  James  —  his  attitude 
of  patronage.  No  writer  of  our  time  has  dispensed 
so  much  of  it.  Whether  his  subject  be  a  mediaeval 
cathedral,  Niagara,  or  a  minor  poet,  if  he  approve, 
patronize  he  inevitably  must  and  will  —  no  completer 
egotist  has  ever  put  pen  to  paper.  And  that  ex 
plains  his  success  as  critic  —  for  criticism  is  only  the 
reaction  of  things  criticised  upon  the  adventurous 
soul  that  has  discovered  them." 

Mr.  James  has  rarely  ventured  farther  in  his  pub 
lic  utterances,  writings  and  ponderable  soul  experi 
ences,  than  from  Boston  to  Italy  via  London  and 
Paris ;  or  backward  in  time,  through  certain  re 
stricted  literary  and  artistic  vistas  during  the  last 


54   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

three  hundred  years.  Consequently  he  finds  himself 
not  at  all  at  home  in  twentieth  century  America,  and 
very  much  at  home  in  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
century  London  and  Paris  as  still  preserved  to  us. 

Mr.  Hervey  concludes :  "  It  is,  I  understand,  a 
fact  which  he  has  himself  admitted,  that  the  great 
majority  of  the  readers  of  Mr.  James  are  women, 
which  is  again  a  testimony  to  his  cat-likeness.  .  .  . 
Men  I  think,  find  it  difficult  to  admire  Mr.  James 
because  his  work  is  all  texture  and  no  fiber.  ...  Of 
real  manliness  there  is  no  more  in  him  than  in  an 
androgyne.  .  .  .  Some  of  his  women  are  convincing, 
but  his  men  never  are  as  men." 

Mr.  Carter  Irving  in  a  signed  criticism  of  The 
Finer  Grain  in  the  New  York  Times  of  November 
5th,  1910,  has  this  to  say:  "  Mr.  Henry  James  im 
putes  to  *  refined  ' —  and  therefore  morbid  and  incon 
clusive  —  persons,  delicacies  of  apprehension  and 
intricacies  of  sensibility  which  they  probably  do  not 
in  fact  possess.  ...  It  argues  Mr.  James'  naive 
consciousness  of  his  essential  inadequacy  that  the 
person  who  most  largely  in  any  one  of  these  sketches 
shares  the  qualities  which,  in  a  literary  sense,  are 
Mr.  James'  own,  is  reduced  to  a  role  of  more  or  less 
ignominious  passivity.  .  .  .  The  result  in  Mr.  James' 
case,  is  not  merely  to  terrify  the  indolent,  but  to  blur 
the  meaning  for  the  precise,  and  to  shock  the  fastidi 
ous.  .  .  .  The  impression  to  the  more  robust  is  that 
of  a  mincing  fop  with  a  monocle.  ...  It  seems 
almost  impossible  not  to  accuse  the  novelist  of  hav 
ing  dazzled  himself  with  a  vision,  which  pre-supposes 
in  the  seer  of  the  vision  an  abyss  of  snobbishness 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          55 

which  one  is  reluctant  to  admit  as  even  possibly  exist 
ent  in  Mr.  James." 

On  the  strength  of  the  evidence  so  far  submitted, 
and  Mr.  James'  known  attitude  as  writer  and  ex 
patriate  towards  the  land  of  his  birth,  and  towards 
progressive  democracy  in  art  and  in  life,  insurgent 
literary  criticism  in  America  is  well  within  its  rights 
in  characterizing  him  as  an  essentially  parochial  in 
tellect,  degenerating  in  the  course  of  his  long  resi 
dence  abroad  into  a  still  more  microscopic  observer 
of  a  still  more  contracted  sphere  and  function  of  art 
and  life ;  a  gradually  clouding  mirror  of  the  char 
acteristically  feministic  culture  that  befogs  itself,  and 
a  highly  unprofitable  vivisector  of  vacuums,  of  the 
last  vacuities  of  human  folly,  pretense  and  preten 
tiousness. 

This  is  not  to  say  or  suggest  that  Mr.  James  is 
consciously  all,  or  most  of  these  things.  There  is 
a  conscious  snobbery  of  money,  of  clothes,  of  all  that 
money  buys  or  takes  to  itself,  that  needs  no  further 
advertisement  in  America  and  the  rest  of  the  world 
to-day.  There  is  an  equally  insolent  snobbery  of 
birth  and  blood,  of  heredity  and  environment  based 
on  past  performances  alone,  that  is  as  much  an 
object  of  mirth  and  charity  to  gods  and  men,  when 
men  and  gods  are  not  otherwise  better  employed. 

These  snobberies,  one  and  all,  are  as  satellites  to 
planets  before  the  more  intense,  the  more  insidious, 
the  more  inveterate,  self-sufficient  and  virulent  snob 
bery,  conscious  or  unconscious,  of  the  intellect,  and  of 
the  class  that  considers  itself  cultured  beyond  all 
^xtjiers  at  the  expense  of  the  rest  of  the  world  — 
whether  directly  or  indirectly  in  alliance  with  royalty, 


56   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

with  aristocracy,  with  craftsmanship,  with  ecclesiasti- 
cism,  with  plutocracy  and  with  the  special  interests 
and  peculiar  privileges  that  such  mesalliances  bring 
into  the  world. 

When  David  Graham  Phillips  tells  us  that  snobs 
and  snobbery  are  made  not  so  much  by  those  higher 
up  as  by  those  lower  down,  he  states  a  truth  that 
leaves  Mr.  James  a  loophole  of  escape  from  the  full 
consequences  of  the  defects  of  his  qualities. 

Evolutionary  literary  criticism  may  go  a  step 
farther  still  —  backwards  and  forwards  both. 

After  the  manner  of  the  conventional  tracer  of 
literary  pedigrees,  one  might  speculate,  if  one  had 
the  time,  on  the  comparative  values  of  men  like  Emer 
son  and  Hawthorne,  and  French  masters  of  fiction 
like  Flaubert  and  Balzac,  in  the  resultant  of  forces 
that  has  evolved  Mr.  James'  peculiar  moral  slant  and 
individual  intellectual  squint.  We  know,  from  his 
own  critical  confessions,  that  he  has  hated  Thackeray 
as  he  hates  Whitman ;  and  that  Balzac  seems  most  ad 
mirable  to  him  in  his  creative  love  for  a  character  like 
Valerie  Marneife,  who  still  —  in  spite  of  the  utmost 
efforts  of  Continental  fiction  from  Paris  to  Naples, 
and  of  the  lady  novelists  of  Anglo-Saxon  heredity  on 
both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  who  go  to  Paris  and  Naples 
for  their  literary  styles  —  remains  the  most  artistic 
ally  vicious  woman  yet  enshrined  in  world  fiction. 

This  kind  of  thing  is  a  sufficiently  wide  remove 
from  the  Puritan  New  England  and  the  mid- Victorian 
Boston  that  are  partly  responsible  for  Mr.  James' 
past  and  present.  To  fix  the  exact  responsibility  for 
the  present  deplorable  state  of  things  demands  a 
deeper  and  wider  psychology  than  anything  yet  at- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          57 

tempted  by  the  novelist's  own  dabblings  in  psychic 
criticism,  or  his  brother's  more  legitimate  attain 
ments  in  the  science  of  the  mind  and  soul.  Any  satis 
factory  solution  of  the  New  England  conscience  —  its 
suppression  for  centuries  under  the  rigors  of  the 
frontier  and  the  no  less  rigorous  Puritan  hierarchy ; 
its  later  provincial  discipline  under  the  rule  of  the  New 
England  schoolma'am  and  the  preacher  of  predesti 
nation  or  Unitarianism ;  its  final  triumph  under  the 
leadership  of  the  men  from  the  West  in  our  last  great 
war  for  freedom ;  and  its  eventual  enlargement  and 
dispersion  in  Europe  and  in  things  European  during 
the  latter  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  —  would  re 
quire  the  energy  and  the  scope  of  an  epic  poet  or  of 
a  monographist  in  many  volumes. 

We  may  note  in  passing,  however,  that  Henry 
James  was  not  prominent,  either  as  an  active  partic 
ipant  or  a  celebrant  in  prose  or  verse,  of  what  must 
even  to  him  have  seemed  a  continental  struggle  and 
a  trial  by  fire  of  New  England  and  national  ideals 
of  freedom  and  fair  play. 

That  he  did  have  some  more  or  less  subtle  sense  of 
the  national  crisis  is  evident  from  his  unsigned  re 
view  of  Whitman's  Drum  Taps,  published  in  The 
Nation  November  16th,  1869. 

There  he  says :  "  You  must  respect  the  public  which 
you  address,  for  it  has  taste  if  you  have  not.  It  de 
lights  in  the  grand,  the  heroic,  the  masculine.  .  .  . 
Qlhis^  democratic  liberty-loving  jieoplej  a  populace 
stern  and  war-tried,  is  a  great  civilizer.  JLL_is__de- 
v-oted  to  refinement.  .  .  .  You  must  be  possessed, 
and  you  must  strive  to  possess,  your  possession." 

The  whole  trend  of  his  attempted  tongue-lashing 


58   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

is  distinctly  antipathetic  to  Whitman  and  Whitman's 
genius ;  and  never  since  has  he  gone  on  record  to  cor 
rect  his  first  impression  of  all  that  Walt  Whitman 
(and  the  wider  extra-Bostonian  movement  of  Ameri 
can  life  and  thought  during  Mr.  James'  single  dec 
ade,  1859—69,  of  continuous  American  residence) 
meant,  still  means,  and  must  always  mean  to  Amer 
ica  and  to  human  history. 

Having  freed  his  mind  so  far,  having  given  us  this 
single  side-light  of  essentially  Jamesian  psychology 
as  regards  the  great  world  of  thought  and  action, 
Mr.  James  continued  to  tarry  on  this  side  of  the  At 
lantic  for  a  few  more  years.  During  this  period,  he 
studied,  briefly,  at  the  Harvard  Law  School ;  for 
some  reason  or  other  he  was  received  at  Mr.  Lowell's ; 
he  contributed  stories  and  critical  articles  to  the  At 
lantic  Monthly  and  the  Galaxy;  and  we  are  told  by 
Miss  Gary  that  he  was  "  prepared  to  probe  deeply 
into  the  spiritual  essence  of  humanity  — '  striking 
matches  '  —  for  us  to  see  the  finer  facts  surrounding 
us ;  facts  of  spirit  wherever  the  human  comes  into 
play,  and  in  the  case  of  inarticulate  landscape,  ex 
quisite  facts  of  surface,  recognitions  of  composition 
and  color  in  the  external  world  that  make  in  his  work 
a  series  of  pictures  so  expressively  painted  as  to 
constitute  in  themselves  a  definite  achievement  for 
art." 

In  the  case  of  inarticulate  landscape  Miss  Gary 
need  go  no  further  than  Mr.  James'  Autumn  Im 
pressions  of  our  own  Berkshires  to  prove  her  point, 
and  ours,  that  Mr.  James  shows  at  times  an  exquisite 
perception  of  exquisite  facts  of  surface. 

Glimpses  like  this,  "  the  rocky  defile,  the  sudden 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          59 

rest  for  wonder,  and  all  the  splendid  reverse  of  the 
medal,  the  world  belted  afresh  as  with  purple  sewn 
with  pearls  —  melting,  in  other  words,  into  violet 
hills  with  vague  white  towns  on  their  breast  " ;  or 
"  the  maker  of  these  reflections  betook  himself  in 
any  case  to  an  expanse  or  rock  by  a  large  bend  of 
the  Saco  and  lingered  there  under  the  infinite  charm 
of  the  place.  The  rich,  full  lapse  of  the  river,  the 
perfect  brownness,  clear  and  deep,  as  of  some  liquid 
agate,  in  its  wide  swirl,  the  large  indifferent  ease  in 
its  pace  and  motion  as  of  some  great  benevolent  insti 
tution  smoothly  working;  all  this  .  .  .  gave  to  the 
scene  something  raising  it  out  of  the  reach  of  the 
most  restless  of  analysts.  .  .  .  This  on  September 
Sunday  mornings  was  what  American  beauty  should 
be ;  it  filled  to  the  brim  its  idea  and  measure  —  the 
great  gay  river  singing  as  it  went,  like  some  reckless 
adventurer,  good-humored  for  the  hour  and  with  his 
hands  in  his  pockets  —  carried  everything  assent- 
ingly  before  it,"  suggest  that  if  Mr.  James  ever 
could  have  got  away  from  his  consuming  and  egotis 
tical  curiosity,  ever  could  have  felt  and  sounded  one 
natural  and  lasting  note  of  human  emotion,  he  might, 
within  his  limitations,  have  been  a  poet  of  some  dis 
tinction  and  minor  power  instead  of  an  emasculated 
critic  and  a  novelist  of  the  unessentially  inane. 

As  it  is,  he  sees  in  America  the  Berkshire  hills, 
the  Saco  valley,  the  spittoons  and  the  absence  of  uni 
formed  functionaries  in  the  Capitol,  and  (in  an  ad 
dress  on  "  The  Lesson  of  Balzac  "  before  the  Con 
temporary  Club  in  Philadelphia,  January  12th,  1905) 
the  following  state  of  things: 

"  Our  huge  Anglo-Saxon  array  of  producers  and 


60   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

readers  presents  a  production  of  uncontrolled  prose, 
untouched  by  criticism,  unguided,  unlighted,  unin- 
structed  ...  on  a  scale  that  is  really  a  new  thing 
in  the  world.  ...  It  is  the  biggest  flock  straying 
without  shepherds  —  the  shepherds  have  diminished 
as  the  flock  increased  .  .  .  quite  as  if  number  and 
quantity  had  got  beyond  them,  or  even  as  if  their 
charge  had  changed  by  some  uncanny  process  into 
ravening  wolves." 

Later  in  the  same  address  he  tells  us  that  Balzac's 
faults  were  mechanical  — "  the  absence  of  satura 
tion  with  his  idea.  Where  saturation  fails,  no  other 
presence  really  avails.  .  .  .  Who  shall  declare  that 
the  severe  economy  (of  modern  writers  of  fiction)  pro 
ceeds  from  anything  worse  than  the  consciousness  of 
a  limited  capital?  This  has  had  terrible  results  for 
the  ]oovel.  Its  misfortune,  its  discredit,  what  I  have 
called  its  bankrupt  state  among  us,  is  the  not  un 
natural  consequence  of  its  having  ceased  for  the  time 
being  to  be  artistically  interesting  .  .  .  showing  on 
every  side  the  stamp  of  the  machine." 

n. 

All  this  is  to  take  a  leaf  out  of  Mr.  James'  own 
book  Views  and  Reviews,  1908  (The  Novels  of 
George  Sand,  first  published  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
October,  '66),  where  he  says  :  "  The  critic's  first  duty 
in  the  presence  of  an  author's  collected  works,  is  to 
seek  some  key  to  his  method,  some  utterance  of  his 
literary  conviction,  some  indication  of  his  ruling  the 
ory,"  and  to  endeavor  to  deduce  from  this  what  he 
values  most  in  life  and  art,  consequently  what  he  ex 
presses  best,  or  worst. 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          61 

During  Mr.  James's  last  visit  to  America,  when  he 
came  to  us  as  a  third  rate  notability,  from  foreign 
parts  —  to  be  wined  and  dined  as  such,  with  all  the 
more  or  less  cultured  and  exquisite  snobbery  that  a 
certain  part  of  our  population  is  apt  to  display  in 
such  cases,  during  his  travels  and  observations  from 
Newport  and  New  York  as  far  west  as  Chicago, 
(later  collected  in  The  American  Scene  neither  more 
nor  less  justly  than  any  third  rate  foreign  critic's 
snap-shot  impressions  from  social  and  material  rapid 
transit,  of  what  America  looks  like  to-day,  what  it 
really  means  and  is  going  to  mean) —  the  only  other 
public  utterance  of  Mr.  James  considered  by  him  of 
sufficient  importance  for  revision  and  publication  was 
an  address  before  the  graduating  class  of  Bryn  Mawr 
College  on  The  Question  of  Our  Speech. 

Of  this,  the  first  twenty  pages  is  about  as  extreme 
an  example  of  how  not  to  speak  as  anything  Mr. 
James,  or  anyone  else,  has  ever  written.  Later  he 
compares  the  English  language,  as  he  finds  it  here 
to-day,  to  a  strip  of  cheap  oil-cloth  laid  down  in  a 
dirty  kitchen  or  a  back  entry  and  tramped  on  by 
the  native  born  and  the  foreign  emigrant  alike. 
Finally  he  concludes :  "  Imitation,  yes,  I  commend  to 
you  earnestly  and  without  reserve  —  imitation  of  a 
formed  and  finished  utterance  wherever  that  music 
steals  upon  the  ear." 

This,  aside  from  The  Lesson  of  Balzac,  is  his 
sole  suggestion  —  not  only  to  the  graduating  class  of 
a  women's  college  which  deservedly  holds  high  scho 
lastic  rank,  but  to  the  American  people  at  large  — 
as  to  measures  and  methods  most  desirable  and  prac 
ticable  in  preserving  and  developing  not  only  the 


62   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

best  English,  but  the  most  important  tendencies  in 
American  literature  of  to-day  and  to-morrow  from 
the  critic's  point  of  view. 

The  fact  taken  in  its  various  bearings  reveals  not 
only  Mr.  James'  essential  inadequacy,  as  man  and 
critic,  but  contemporary  recognition  of  this  as  well, 
at  Harvard  and  elsewhere. 

It  is  natural  that  Mr.  James  and  other  precisians 
of  his  own  microscopic  order  of  mind  should  have 
grave  fears  for  the  future  of  the  English  language 
here  and  abroad.  It  is  a  signal  instance  of  how  far 
the  mind  of  the  specialist  that  has  followed  the  line 
of  least  resistance  through  a  single  dimension  of  pene 
tration  and  growth  can  be  at  once  microscopic  and 
superficial  through  failing  to  focus  the  cosmic  per 
spective  and  point  of  view. 

One  need  not  indulge  profusely  in  the  somewhat 
windy  rhetoric  that  the  mind  and  soul  of  Mr.  James 
and  his  fellow  idolaters  abhor,  to  assure  them  that 
the  future  of  the  English  language  and  of  litera 
ture  in  America  is  bounded  on  the  north  by  Alaska, 
and  on  the  south  by  Panama  and  beyond,  on  the  east 
by  Europe,  and  on  the  west  by  Asia;  that  it  is  as 
boundless,  as  rich  and  exhaustless  as  the  great  plains 
and  the  world's  harvests  that  are  raised  there;  as 
high  and  as  deep  as  the  Rocky  Mountains,  the  Great 
Lakes,  the  Eastern  and  the  Western  Oceans,  the 
heavens  above  us  and  the  minds  and  souls  of  the  men 
and  women  beneath  them. 

This  is  a  plain  statement  of  fact  that  certain  of 
the  writings  of  Frank  Norris,  Stewart  Edward  White, 
Jack  London,  Owen  Wister,  Winston  Churchill, 
James  B.  Connolly,  George  W.  Cable,  Henry  B. 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          63 

Fuller,  John  Luther  Long,  John  Fox,  Jr.,  Brand 
Whitlock,  Weir  Mitchell,  Norman  Duncan,  O.  Henry, 
David  Graham  Phillips,  and  divers  other  Ameri 
cans  who  are  delimitating  our  national  geographical 
and  spiritual  frontiers,  will  sufficiently  bear  out  for 
the  day  and  hour. 

We  may  not  believe  nowadays,  in  common  with  ob 
solete  and  obsolescent  Fourth  of  July  orators  East 
and  West,  that  the  charter  of  liberties  and  our 
rights  to  free  speech,  free  thought  and  its  most  last 
ing  interpretation  in  our  language,  is  founded  immu 
tably  on  Plymouth  Rock  and  the  Constitution,  the 
New  England  conscience  and  the  New  England  ver 
sion  of  life  and  art  in  prose  and  verse.  We  may 
have  quite  as  serious  doubts  of  all  this  as  Mr.  James 
ever  had  or  professes  to  have. 

At  the  same  time  it  is  possible  for  us  to  believe 
that  one  American  novel  like  Mr.  Churchill's  Con- 
iston,  which  deals  directly  with  the  partnership  be 
tween  "  big  business  "  and  corrupt  politics,  and  which 
sounds  the  literary  and  human  note  of  revolt  truly 
and  effectively ;  or  one  book  of  American  short  stories 
like  Mr.  Connolly's  Out  of  Gloucester,  salt  with 
the  brine  of  Atlantic  storms,  and  eloquent  of  the 
virile  men  who  ride  them  out,  and  the  mothers  and 
wives  of  heroes  who  wait  at  home  for  them ;  has  done 
more,  and  will  do  more,  in  this  century  and  the  cen 
turies  to  come,  to  preserve  to  us  those  sources  of  pure 
English  undefiled  that  best  embody  the  Anglo-Saxon 
ideal  of  fair  play  and  efficient  words  and  deeds  in 
these  United  States  of  America,  than  any  or  all  of 
Mr.  James's  two  score  and  more  collected  volumes  of 
any  sort  of  literary  work  whatever. 


64       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Like  Mr.  James  we  have  grave  and  lasting  reasons 
for  doubt  as  to  just  what  the  years  to  come  shall 
yield  us,  or  shall  take  away.  Our  future  as  a  world 
power  in  the  fields  of  literature  and  of  action  is 
doubtless  threatened  by  dangers  from  within  and 
from  without. 

Expatriation,  superficiality,  scholasticism,  race 
suicide,  extravagance  in  thought  and  material  expres 
sion  ;  failure  to  conserve  adequately  our  material  and 
spiritual  resources  as  a  nation  and  as  individuals ;  the 
tendency  to  "  stand  pat  "  and  to  live  on  our  income 
or  on  our  capital,  in  the  world  of  facts  and  in  that  of 
ideas  and  ideals ;  the  disposition  to  stand  still  and 
to  mark  time,  tending  more  and  more  toward  national 
retreat  and  apathy,  recklessness  or  cynicism,  evi 
denced  in  the  urgent  need  for  a  new  American  mer 
chant  marine,  the  rising  cost  of  living  and  age  of 
marriage ;  the  commercialization  of  divorce,  of  lit 
erature,  of  journalism,  of  the  drama;  the  trustifica 
tion  of  almost  every  primary  necessity  of  life,  money 
included,  and  the  resultant  growth  of  unrest,  of  law 
lessness,  of  all  the  forces  making  for  anarchy  and 
industrial  chaos:  all  these  have  to  be  met  and  reck 
oned  with,  by  all  good  Americans,  literary  and  non- 
literary  alike,  of  the  next  two  generations,  within  our 
own  sphere  of  influence. 

These  are  the  vital  issues,  that  are  going  to  make, 
that  have  already  begun  to  inform  and  inspire  an 
American  literature  of  to-day  and  to-morrow,  which 
will  in  no  small  degree  be  worthy  of  the  name. 

Mr.  James  and  his  tribe  have  apparently  never 
even  dreamed  of  the  beginning  of  these  things.  He 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          65 

calls  us  crude  and  barbaric,  lithographers  in  fiction 
and  bunglers  in  the  finer  arts ;  he  shakes  the  dust  of 
America  from  his  feet  once  more;  he_speaks  of  the 
tragic  futility  of  Newport  and  upper  Fifth  Ave- 
iue ;  and  makes  Newport  and  upper  Fifth  Avenue,  ap 
parently,  his  chief  criterions  of  this  country's  prog 
ress  since  his  last  visit. 

Here  we  touch  a  wider  field  and  a  larger  audience 
than  any  that  reads  and  is  directly  influenced  by  his 
writings. 

It  is  of  comparatively  little  importance  to  us  and 
to  the  rest  of  the  world  that  Mr.  James  calls  our 
fiction  poverty-stricken,  and  thereby  displays  su 
premely  his  own  poverty  of  spirit  and  lack  of  depth 
and  discernment  as  a  literary  and  social  analyst. 

It  is  however  of  considerably  greater  importance 
that  he  and  thousands  like  him  —  expatriates  in  place 
or  in  spirit,  for  the  moment  or  for  a  life-time  — 
should  so  far  mis-read  the  meaning  and  the  message 
of  America  as  to  mistake  hopelessly  temporary  crude- 
nesses  in  execution,  transient  disputes  and  com 
promises  as  to  the  details  of  the  day's  work,  for  any 
thing  like  ultimate  failure  or  racial  defeat  in  the 
building  of  the  house  of  life  that  evolution  and  the 
power  informing  it  has  planned  for  us. 

Mr.  James  is  enough  of  a  critic  of  literature  not 
to  judge  of  an  author's  finished  volume  from  his  first 
rough  notes ;  he  knows  enough  about  art  not  to  pro 
nounce  finally  on  a  sculptor's  conception  when  the 
marble  is  but  half  blocked  out  or  the  clay  is  in  the 
molding. 

We  may  imagine  him  carried  back  in  spirit  to  the 


66   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Italy  that  he  raves  about  when  Giotto's  Campanile 
was  a-building,  to  Venice  when  St.  Mark's  and  all 
the  rest  of  the  wonder  city  began  to  rise  from  piles 
planted  in  the  mud  of  the  lagoons. 

Probably,  if  he  had  seen  the  architect's  plans  in 
the  first  instance,  he  might  have  envisioned  some  fore 
cast  of  the  completed  work  through  stages  of  scaf 
folding,  beds  of  mortar,  heaps  of  sand  and  piles  of 
rubble  and  unshaped  stones.  Whether  he  could  ever 
have  imagined  half  or  one-tenth  of  the  splendor  and 
nobility  of  Cinque-cento  Venice  from  its  first  rude  be 
ginnings  is  extremely  doubtful. 

If  he  had  not  only  imagined  it,  but  had  seen  it  and 
lived  in  it  outside  of  a  monastery  or  the  palaces  of 
the  ruling  class,  even  Mr.  James'  limited  intellect 
might  have  perceived  in  time  that  the  Venice  of  his 
dreams  to-day  was  then  quite  as  full  of  graft  and 
greed  to  the  square  inch,  of  superficial  polish,  hol- 
lowness,  rottenness  and  coarseness  of  fiber  within, 
of  newly  rich  barbarism  and  cultured  pretense,  of 
crude  and  transient  literary  and  artistic  experiments 
and  failures,  as  New  York  or  San  Francisco  is  at  this 
moment. 

If  not  in  Venice,  certainly  he  might  have  seen  this 
in  the  England  of  his  idolatry,  that  went  to  the  mak 
ing  of  those  great  feudal  houses  that  he  celebrates  — 
houses  that  rose  from  the  ruins  of  the  Wars  of  the 
Roses  and  the  gold  that  the  eighth  Henry  squeezed 
from  plundered  monasteries  and  the  dismantled  ma 
chinery  of  the  ecclesiastic  graft  of  the  sixteenth  cen 
tury;  from  the  tainted  money  of  the  time  that  en 
dowed  Oxford  and  Cambridge  and  the  great  English 
public  schools ;  from  every  contribution  by  contempo- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          67 

rary  malefactors  of  great  wealth  that,  went  to  the 
making  of  the  birthright  of  the  younger  sons  and 
daughters  of  our  race. 

Certainly  he  might  have  failed  to  see  there  the 
England  and  America  of  to-day,  which  have  evolved 
from  the  mediaeval  state  of  mind  that  Mr.  James 
condones  and  flatters,  in  so  far  as  he  condones  and 
flatters  himself;  from  the  fires  that  the  special  inter 
ests  of  the  day  kindled  at  Smithfield  and  at  Oxford ; 
from  the  royal  wrecks  and  titled  profligacies  of  the 
Restoration  and  the  Regency;  to  all  that  Anglo- 
Saxon  hegemony  and  government  of  the  people,  by 
the  people,  for  the  people,  progressively  in  virtue  of 
the  square  deal  and  free  competition,  means  and  must 
mean  in  the  world  of  to-day  and  to-morrow. 

These  are  a  few  of  the  larger  values  and  deeper 
intensities  of  the  life  of  the  past  as  it  survives  to-day 
in  Mr.  James's  minsters  and  ivy-clad  colleges,  in  his 
town  and  country  houses  of  a  titled  nobility  and  aris 
tocracy  of  inherited  wealth  and  privilege,  that  he  con 
sistently  neglects  or  fails  to  detect  in  what  Miss  Gary 
calls  the  "  admirable  liberality  of  his  theory  of  the 
world's  wealth,  of  the  gold  that  should  be  made  to 
6  drip  color.'  " 

And  the  shortness  and  dimness  of  sight,  the  moral 
myopia  and  astigmatism  with  which  he  views  the  re 
sources  of  his  own  chosen  field  and  art  treasury 
in  Spoils  of  Poynton,  The  Golden  Bowl,  The 
Wings  of  the  Dove,  The  American,  The  Tragic 
Muse,  Tlie  Awkward  Age,  and  The  Ambassadors, 
is  no  more  startling  and  unpardonable,  perhaps, 
for  a  person  of  his  limited  resources  who  has  lived 
for  half  a  century  in  and  near  the  capital  of  the 


68   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

world's  greatest  empire,  than  his  utter  failure  and 
refusal  to  grasp  the  whole  meaning  and  purpose  of 
nineteenth  and  twentieth  century  life  from  London 
and  Paris  to  Pekin  and  Tokio,  from  Berlin  to  New 
York,  from  Rome  to  Rhodesia,  from  Madrid  and 
Lisbon  to  Melbourne  and  Buenos  Aires. 

Doubtless  in  all  this  Mr.  James  is  more  to  be  pitied 
than  blamed.  Impartial  American  criticism  to-day 
cannot  hold  him  wholly  responsible  for  the  faults 
and  defects  of  his  early  training  and  education ;  nor 
for  the  weakness  and  insufficiency  and  the  temperamen 
tal  bias  that  unfitted  him  for  the  harder  environ 
ment  of  New  England,  and  drove  him  abroad  to  make 
the  first  and  most  facile  use  of  such  literary  and  crit 
ical  equipment  as  time  and  chance,  nature  and  evolu 
tion,  bestowed  upon  him. 

No  more  do  we  wholly  blame  the  Hungarian  gypsy 
or  the  son  of  sunny  Italy,  whom  nature  and  evolution 
carry  across  the  Atlantic  to  play  rag-time  for  a 
sufficient  consideration  in  the  coin  of  the  realm,  in  the 
palaces  of  the  great  or  the  palatial  hotels  and  lobster 
palaces  that  outshine  them. 

No  more  do  we  blame  the  lady  novelist  or  news 
paper  woman  that  racial  or  individual  unrest  allures 
from  the  farm  and  the  home,  to  come  to  the  great 
city,  there  to  chronicle  the  doings  of  High  Society 
between  covers,  or  in  the  columns  of  our  yellowest 
yellow  journal. 

Doubtless  in  this  best  of  all  possible  worlds,  all 
these  human  and  artistic  types  have  to  exist,  and 
serve  some  cosmic  purpose  that  is  more  or  less  futile 
or  mysterious  to  the  average  eye. 

It  is  possible  that  many  such  artists  have  some- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          69 

thing  like  the  same  degree  of  pride  in  their  work  and 
art  that  Mr.  James  has. 

Certainly  few  of  them  are  as  well  equipped  by  con 
ventional  education  and  culture  for  a  true  and  last 
ing  interpretation  of  life  through  a  temperament, 
artistically,  as  Mr.  James  was  when  he  left  Boston  in 
1869. 

In  his  case  it  seems  to  have  been  the  story  of  the 
seed  falling  on  stony  ground,  and  failing  to  realize 
that  essential  fitness,  for  one  purpose  or  another,  may 
have  lain  quite  as  much  with  the  ground  as  with  the 
seed.  It  is  possible  that  Mr.  James  has  found  Lon 
don  and  Oxford,  in  the  long  run,  no  more  stony  than 
Boston  or  New  York  would  have  been  to  him. 

In  any  case  the  seed  has  sprung  up  comparatively 
quickly,  and  it  has  withered  in  a  last  state  that  is 
worse  than  the  first. 

It  takes  a  fairly  strong  and  vital  nature,  rich  in 
insight  and  sympathy,  to  pierce  beneath  and  beyond 
the  pavements  and  the  brown-stone  fronts  of  any 
great  American  city  to-day,  and  to  flower  forth 
therefrom  with  any  lasting  literary  color  and  fra 
grance,  interpretative  of  the  essential  common  and  di 
vine  ambitions  and  activities,  patiences  and  imperfec 
tions  of  the  many  millions. 

Possibly  it  takes  quite  as  great  an  art  and  a  heart 
to  set  forth  London  and  Paris,  Rome  or  Venice  to 
day  adequately  on  paper,  save  in  the  most  superficial 
and  spectacular  aspect. 

At  any  rate,  Mr.  Henry  James,  the  most  perfect 
type  the  world  has  ever  seen  of  the  literary  old  maid 
of  New  England  heredity  and  Britannic  and  Con 
tinental  vicissitudes,  neither  makes  to-day  nor  ever 


70   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

has  made  any  single-hearted  effort  to  do  as  much  or 
as  little. 

After  the  first  starved  art  sense  has  satiated  itself, 
after  the  first  fairly  legitimate  curiosity  about  new 
manners  and  customs,  social  developments  and  de 
cadences  has  worked  and  written  itself  out,  life  be 
gins  to  bore  him  as  it  bores  the  Massachusetts  old 
maid  who  knows  Europe  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  cheaper  pensions  of  every  capital  and  art  center ; 
who  is  continually  on  the  move  in  the  spirit  or  the 
flesh,  and  who  finds  each  new  point  of  departure  more 
depressing  than  the  last. 

For  the  literature  of  Henry  James  from  start  to 
finish,  with  an  inconsiderable  number  of  exceptions, 
is  in  plot  and  in  purport  a  story  of  more  or  less 
tragic  futilities  and  failures.  His  people  seem  oc 
casionally  to  start  for  somewhere  with  something  like 
a  definite  end  in  view.  But  they  never  get  any 
where. 

Miss  Gary  herself  admits  in  The  Novels  of  Henry 
James  —  The  Question  of  Wealth,  page  139  —  Fail 
ure  and  Success :  "  It  is  indeed  hardly  too  bold  an 
inference  to  draw  from  the  mass  of  his  work  that  he 
prefers  the  former  to  the  latter." 

Reading  one  of  his  novels  has  been  compared  to 
climbing  a  mountain  of  sand.  We  may  be  in  doubt 
about  the  height  and  the  reality  of  the  mountain. 
There  is  very  little  doubt,  however,  about  the  lack  of 
vista  and  perspective  when  we  reach  the  jumping  off 
place  —  save  in  the  minds  of  the  most  inveterate 
symbolists  and  obscurationists  of  Miss  Gary's  type. 

Such  states  of  mind  remind  us  that  we  are  fear 
fully  and  wonderfully  made,  and  that  as  to  the  why's 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          71 

and  wherefore's  of  any  modern  and  emancipated 
woman's  mental  processes,  no  man  on  earth  may 
rashly  predict  or  predicate  too  far.  A  wife  or 
mother  by  nature  or  adoption  may  transfer  her  af 
fections  temporarily  or  permanently  to  the  vainest 
man  or  the  weakest  and  worst  tempered  brat  in  the 
community ;  and  we  may  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  all 
this  does  credit  to  her  heart  rather  than  her  head, 
without  considering  her  in  all  respects  a  fit  candidate 
for  a  lunatic  asylum. 

Similarly  when  fashion  decrees  that  our  women 
shall  parade  in  Broadway  and  Fifth  Avenue  in  hobble 
and  harem  skirts  and  other  works  of  art  and  sur 
vivals  of  barbarism  made  in  Paris  and  not  yet  sup 
pressed  at  home ;  when  lovely  woman  in  our  midst  for 
more  than  fifty  years  has  spent  our  income  freely, 
and  consistently  cried  for  more;  when  the  result  of 
her  last  half  century's  patronage,  appreciation  and 
partial  production  of  things  artistic  in  America  is 
spectacularly  and  inconveniently  in  evidence  every 
where:  we  are  entitled  to  reserve  our  own  conclu 
sions,  where  we  do  not  speak  them  out. 

And  we  do.  For  the  last  thirty  or  forty  years 
Anglo-American  fashion  has  decreed  that  Henry 
James  shall  be  fashionable  because  obscure  —  as 
Browning,  Ibsen  and  Bernard  Shaw  were  once  fash 
ionably  obscure  in  the  hands  of  professional  and  ex 
pensive  exploiters  and  interpreters. 

It  may  be  a  waste  of  good  Anglo-Saxon  words,  as 
wanton  as  to  solemnly  proclaim  that  a  spade  is  a 
spade,  to  suggest  that  now  and  then  the  fiction  of 
Mr.  Henry  James  is  the  dryest  of  the  dry,  and  that 
it  occasionally  exerts  the  properties  of  a  soporific 


72   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  enervating  drug  upon  those  who  trifle  too  long 
with  it. 

However,  Miss  Gary  has  evidently  done  her  level 
best  to  gild  the  pill  and  to  sugar  the  sand,  and  she 
shall  be  given  full  credit  for  it  here,  before  we  re 
vert  to  our  former  proposition  that  Henry  James  is 
dull  frequently  in  print  and  out  of  it  —  that  he  began 
to  be  dull  and  heavy  like  the  typical  New  England 
spinster  who  elects  to  live  abroad,  as  soon  as  he  had 
gorged  to  repletion  on  the  art  life  and  social 
history  of  the  Old  World,  so  far  as  he  or  his  followers 
are  capable  of  taking  it  in. 

That  he  is  bored,  frequently,  he  admits  in  his  own 
preface  to  The  Point  of  View  (New  York  edition), 
where  he  says :  "  The  Point  of  View,  in  fine,  I  fear, 
was  but  to  commemorate  punctually  enough  its  au 
thor's  perverse  and  incurable  disposition  to  interest 
himself  in  his  own  (always  so  quickly  stale)  experi 
ence,  under  certain  sorts  of  pressure,  than  that  of 
conceivable  fellow  mortals,  which  might  be  myste 
riously  and  refreshingly  different." 

In  another  man,  in  a  bed-ridden  cripple  perhaps, 
all  this  might  be  interpreted  as  nothing  worse  than 
a  natural  longing  for  adventures  of  the  mind  and 
spirit  when  adventuring  of  the  flesh  was  denied  him. 
We  know  what  Stevenson  did  in  the  last  years  of  his 
life  —  under  what  handicaps  David  Balfour  was  writ 
ten  —  and  we  have  merely  to  compare  not  alone  the 
grace,  the  color,  the  essential  fiber  and  warm  hu 
manity  of  Stevenson's  style  and  method  with  the 
tenuous  "  intensity  "  and  wordy  effusiveness  of  Mr. 
James'  later  experiments,  but  simply  to  set  up  side 
by  side  the  hero  of  Kidnapped  and  its  sequel  and 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          73 

the  brave  loveliness  of  Catriona,  with  The  Ameri 
can  (perhaps  Mr.  James'  most  ambitious  and  most 
futile  male  portrait)  and  the  "  special  psycholog 
ical  charm  "  of  IVIaggie  Verver  in  TJi^GoJ^n  Bowl 
(concerning  which  Miss  Cary  tells  us  "that  it  is 
the  _4m^rJ£aji_±^pe,  is  hardly  to  be  made  a  matter 
of  pride  with  us,  is  much  more  to  be  made  a  matter 
of  shame  in  the  degree  to  which  we  manage  to  depart 
from  it"),  to  get  some  fair  standard  of  the  degree 
to  which  Mr.  James  continually  fails  to  reduce  ab 
stract  problems  of  unusual  human  relations  to  con 
crete  and  effective,  interesting  and  inspiring  form. 

One  may  state  one  of  Mr.  James'  commonly  de 
cadent  and  curiously  morbid  themes,  that  of  Tlie 
Golden  Bold  —  attenuated  by  this  master  spinner  of 
cobweb  sophistry  into  more  than  eight  hundred 
pages  —  in  a  dozen  words  more  or  less.  According 
to  him  and  the  critic  last  quoted,  it  is  highly  laudable 
for  an  American  girl,  daughter  of  a  retired  multi 
millionaire,  herself  married  to  a  Roman  prince,  to  en 
ter  into  a  conspiracy  of  silence  with  her  husband  and 
his  mistress,  who  is  also  the  wife  of  his  own  wife's 
father,  simply  that  the  retired  multi-millionaire's 
problematic  peace  of  mind  may  be  preserved. 

It  is  true  that  Adam  Verver  goes  back  to  American 
City  and  takes  his  wife  Charlotte  with  him  after 
Maggie's  discovery  of  the  relations  between  Char 
lotte  and  the  Prince.  It  is  true  that  Maggie  is  sug 
gested  to  us,  rather  than  represented,  as  a  girl  who 
has  literally  known  no  evil  till  she  makes  the  dis 
covery  outlined  above,  nearly  a  year  after  her  mar 
riage. 

This  book,  published  in  1904,  is  supposed,  so  far 


74   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

as  one  can  gather  from  Mr.  James'  chronic  evasive 
ness,  to  deal  with  contemporary  international  social 
conditions  and  relations.  On  this  ground  Mr.  James 
does  not  succeed  in  making  Maggie  (Miss  Gary's 
ideal  American  type),  like  most  of  his  other  charac 
ters,  much  less  than  incredible  —  when  the  American 
theory  and  practice  of  to-day,  as  to  the  education  of 
young  girls  and  the  relative  values  of  frankness  or 
subterfuge  in  all  family  relations,  is  taken  into  con 
sideration. 

Opinions  will  differ,  just  so  long  or  so  short  a  time 
as  the  book  continues  to  be  read,  as  to  the  essential 
heroism  or  immorality,  higher  wisdom  or  superficial 
idiocy,  pardonable  and  feminine  duplicity,  or  out 
right  deceit  and  injustice  to'  all  concerned,  in  Mag 
gie's  final  decision  to  permit  her  mother-in-law  to 
take  her  father  away  without  any  other  noticeable 
reparation  or  repentance  than  that  involved  in  es 
caping  from  a  situation  intolerable  to  all  concerned, 
and  in  departing  into  apparent  exile  in  the  country  of 
her  birth,  of  which  we  are  led  to  infer  she  also  is 
typical. 

Consciously  or  unconsciously,  Mr.  James  seems  to 
be  continually  trying  to  suggest  that  Italian  Princes 
and  English  lords  (provided  they  do  not  have  to  mas 
querade  as  valets  and  barbers)  are  or  ought  to  be 
irresistible  to  American  girls  of  the  type  that  he  and 
Miss  Gary  admire  most :  those  possessed  of  more 
money  than  brains,  more  sentiment  than  sound  moral 
ity,  more  impracticality  and  futile  effervescence  than 
anything  like  an  efficient  and  consistent  grasp  of  life. 

We  may  admit  to  our  sorrow  that  such  American 
types  do  exist.  We  may  also  admit  that  a  com- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          75 

paratively  small  proportion  of  international  mar 
riages  with  American  millions  on  one  side  and  Euro 
pean  titles  on  the  other  have,  so  far  as  the  world 
knows,  turned  out  at  least  as  happily  as  the  average 
marriage  in  America  to-day.  We  may  even  admit 
that  a  Russian  grand  duke,  an  Italian  prince,  a 
French  marquis,  an  English  earl,  may  now  and  then 
be  no  more  consistently  brutal  in  his  sexual  aberra 
tions  than  some  of  the  present  generation  of  male 
factors  of  great  wealth  here  at  home. 

Here  in  America,  however,  we  have  not  yet  reached 
the  stage  of  training  our  sons  and  daughters  to  be 
lieve  that  such  malefactors  should  be  paid,  that  they 
should  be  dowered  with  millions  of  other  people's 
dollars,  for  the  results  of  similar  sexual  excess  in 
themselves  or  their  ancestors.  Apparently,  however, 
if  such  a  state  of  things  could  be  brought  about  per 
manently  here,  it  would  provide  a  legitimate  field  for 
literary  expression  in  Mr.  James's  and  Miss  Gary's 
scheme  of  spiritual  intensities  and  those  higher  uses 
of  wealth  that  should  be  made  to  drip  color  for  the 
delectation  of  the  titled  parasites  of  the  world  and 
the  untitled  snobs  and  charlatans  who  cause  them  to 
exist. 

Here  is  where  we  take  issue  squarely  with  Mr. 
James,  unconscious  charlatan  though  he  may  be,  and 
with  all  who  consciously  or  unconsciously,  directly 
or  indirectly,  favor  or  foster  him.  We  can  forgive 
him  the  temporary  perversion  of  style  and  method 
in  the  work  of  his  disciples  and  imitators.  Edith 
Wharton's  single  emergence  from  a  temporary  tend 
ency  of  this  sort  would  fully  atone  for  that.  Joseph 
Conrad,  too,  we  perhaps  owe  to  him  in  part. 


76   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

We  can  explain,  if  we  cannot  wholly  admire,  his 
essential  old-maidishness,  his  narrowness  and  super 
ficiality  of  outlook  and  sympathy,  his  inveterate 
tendency  to  be  bored  by  all  he  neither  tries  nor  cares 
to  understand,  and  his  essential  incapacity  to  focus 
life  fairly  either  under  or  away  from  his  astigmatic 
hand  lens. 

As  to  his  curiosity  for  curiosity's  sake,  persisted 
in  and  exploited  till  it  has  become  a  habit  and  a  dis 
ease,  we  may  quote  Mr.  Brownell  once  more :  "  What 
we  chiefly  perceive  is  his  own  curiosity.  Of  this  in 
deed  we  get  I  think  a  surfeit.  (  !)  The  Sacred 
Fount  for  this  reason  is  an  unpleasant  as  well  as  a 
mystifying  book.  .  .  .  From  this  story  we  might  in 
fer  that  the  close  observation  of  a  squirming  and  suf 
fering  woman  could  really  occupy  the  leisure  of  a 
scrupulous  gentleman.  .  .  .  The  amount  of  prying, 
eavesdropping,  '  snooping '  in  that  exasperating 
performance  is  prodigious." 

Nor  is  The  Sacred  Fount,  not  to  mention  others 
of  the  later  books  and  tales,  alone  in  the  exploitation 
of  scandal,  old  or  new,  embryonic  or  defunct,  sup 
pressed  or  scented  out.  In  spite  of  the  morbid  plot 
and  the  final  futility  of  the  principal  character  as 
well  as  of  the  book  itself,  Mr.  James  in  many  ways  is 
very  nearly  at  his  best  in  The  American. 

Here  we  have :  "  She  is  poor,  she  is  pretty,  she  is 
silly  —  it  seems  to  me  that  she  can  go  only  one 
way  —  I  am  curious  to  see  just  how  things  will  go." 
It  may  be  that,  with  Mr.  James'  peculiar  order  of 
mind,  the  development  of  this  character  was  essential 
for  the  working  out  of  the  plot  he  has  chosen.  We 
do  not  find  the  highest  artistic  reticence  in  the  way 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          77 

she  is  worked  out,  or  in  the  inclusion  of  remarks  like 
the  following: 

"  This  horrible  Paris  hardens  one's  heart,  .  .  . 
To  see  this  little  woman's  drama  play  itself  out,  now, 
is,  for  me,  an  intellectual  pleasure.  .  .  .  When  one 
has  nothing  to  think  about,  one  must  think  about 
little  baggages.  I  suppose  it  is  better  to  be  serious 
about  light  things  than  not  to  be  serious  at  all.  .  .  . 
She  is  a  very  curious  and  ingenious  piece  of  machin 
ery.  I  like  to  see  it  in  operation." 

This  reference  to  human  machinery,  taken  in  con 
nection  with  the  initial  caption  of  this  essay,  may 
fairly  be  viewed  in  the  light  of  a  self-revelation. 

Mr.  Brownell  does  not  explicitly  say  that  Mr. 
James  is  absolutely  heartless  ;  I  am  not  aware  that  Mr. 
James's  tendency  towards  "  simplification  "  has  ever 
claimed  quite  as  much  or  as  little  for  itself.  But  the 
inferences  are  all  on  one  side. 

Thus  Mr.  Brownell :  "  He  rather  pointedly  neg 
lects  the  province  of  the  heart.  Are  we  to  be  in 
terested  in  fiction  without  liking  it?  And  are  we 
to  savor  art  without  experiencing  emotion  ?  "  Here 
he  quotes  Scott  in  a  dispute  with  Lockhart  where 
the  latter  holds  that  life  should  be  considered  as  mere 
material  for  art.  Sir  Walter  says :  "  We  shall 
never  learn  to  feel  and  respect  our  real  calling,  un 
less  we  have  taught  ourselves  to  consider  everything 
as  mere  moonshine  compared  with  the  education  of 
the  heart." 

Scott's  views  here  quoted  may  be  extreme  in  this 
day  or  any  other  day.  Certainly  he  did  not  always 
carry  them  out  consistently  in  his  own  work.  Many 
of  the  Waverley  novels  contain  page  after  page  of 


78   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

prolix  description  or  dissertation,  almost  as  trying 
to  the  gentlest  reader  as  Mr.  James'  own  most  dif 
fuse  tenuosity. 

These  defects  of  construction,  or  mere  marginal 
notes  and  appendices  not  indicated  as  such,  have  not 
helped  the  Wizard  of  the  North  to  fix  indelibly  in 
our  mind  the  life  of  his  own  time,  or  of  any  century 
he  undertook  to  paint,  as  Flaubert's  Salammbo  or 
Thackeray's  Henry  Esmond  are  capable  of  doing. 

At  the  same  time  Scott  triumphed  as  Stevenson 
did  (and  will  continue  to  do  as  long  as  English  is 
read),  first  and  foremost  by  the  spirit  and  vivacity 
natural  to  himself  and  reincarnated  in  his  charac 
ters,  which  make  us  feel  and  live,  love,  hate,  suffer,  en 
dure  and  triumph  with  them  and  through  them  and 
him;  and  compared  to  which  Mr.  James's  most  fin 
ished  or  fussed  over  productions  are  as  obscure 
shadows  in  a  mist,  or  dry  point  etchings  in  black  and 
white  or  dingy  monotone  beside  the  work  of  a  great 
master  and  colorist. 

It  is  undeniable  that  Mr.  James  was  influenced  by 
Manet,  Whistler  and  the  finer  impressionists  in  oils 
and  in  dry  point,  as  he  was  by  Balzac  and  the  later 
French  impressionists  in  print,  in  constructing  his 
theory,  in  working  out  his  practice  of  the  short  story 
culminating  in  later  productions  like  Mono,  Mon- 
travers,  of  which  Mr.  Irving  says :  "  She  is  a  mar 
velous  impressionistic  sketch,  but  if  you  look  at  her 
closely  you  cannot  see  her.  Her  aunt  is  as  definite 
as  Mr.  James  will  let  anybody  be." 

It  is  true  that  he  made  some  suggestive  advances  in 
his  early  tales  (occasionally  in  his  later  ones),  certain 
of  which  may  be  compared  to  short  stories  like  Ste- 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          79 

venson's  A  Lodging  for  the  Night  and  Providence 
and  the  Guitar,  not  absolutely  to  the  complete 
technical  disgrace  of  the  American  expatriate.  Art 
owes  him  that  much.  Literary  ambition  and  in 
dustry  owes  him  something  for  his  attempt  to  apply 
the  same  theory  and  methods  to  the  construction  of 
the  longer  novel  of  manners.  It  is  true  that  he  con 
tinued  to  forward  evidences  of  his  literary  theories  to 
Turgenev  during  a  period  covering  several  years  of 
the  later  part  of  the  great  Russian's  life.  It  is  not 
true  that  Turgenev  ever  evidenced  any  marked  ap 
preciation  of  such  attentions  on  the  part  of  Mr. 
James. 

Literary  criticism  owes  him,  among  other  debts,  his 
appreciations  of  natures  and  ideals  as  far  alien  to 
his*  own  as  those  of  Turgenev  and  Rudyard  Kip 
ling.  We  have  yet  to  learn  that  Mr.  Kipling  has 
shown  any  tendency  to  reciprocate.  Mr.  James' 
introduction  to  Mine  Own  People,  proclaiming  his 
own  discovery  of  a  youthful  phenomenon  in  his  own 
art,  and  not  wholly  devoid  of  patronage  and  of  dis 
cursiveness,  is  largely  technical  in  its  appreciation. 
It  ends  characteristically: 

"  We  don't  detect  him  stumbling ;  on  the  contrary 
he  steps  out  quite  as  briskly  as  at  first  and  still  more 
firmly.  There  is  something  zealous  and  craftsman- 
like  in  him  which  shows  that  he  feels  both  joy  and  re 
sponsibility. 

"  A  whimsical,  wanton  reader,  haunted  by  a  recol 
lection  of  all  the  good  things  that  he  has  seen  spoiled ; 
by  a  sense  of  the  miserable,  or,  at  any  rate  the  in 
ferior,  in  so  many  continuations  and  endings,  is  almost 
capable  of  perverting  poetic  justice  to  the  idea  that 


80   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

it  would  be  even  positively  well  for  so  surprising  a 
producer  to  remain  simply  the  fortunate,  suggestive, 
unconfirmed  and  unqualified  representative  of  what  he 
has  actually  done.  We  can  always  refer  to  that." 

Passing  by  the  obvious  deduction  in  the  case  of 
Mr.  James  himself,  we  have  never  learned  that  Mr. 
James  has  ever  expressed  any  marked  admiration  for 
the  later,  broader  and  higher  aspects  of  Kipling's 
work,  expressed  in  verse  in  The  Song  of  the  English, 
The  White  Man's  Burden  and  The  Recessional;  and 
in  prose  in  Judson  and  the  Empire,  William  the  Con 
queror,  The  Brushwood  Boy,  They,  the  story  of  the 
American  prisoner  in  South  Africa,  and  other  in 
stances  too  numerous  to  mention. 

This  failure,  like  his  other  failures,  may  be  due  to 
wanton  whimsicality:  it  is  probably  due  to  tempera 
mental  and  critical  qualities  which,  as  Mr.  Brownell 
says,  make  his  critical  method  agglutinative,  not 
synthetic,  and  his  general  point  of  view  unpractical, 
impracticable  and,  in  the  long  run,  barely  worth  con 
sidering. 

For  all  this  perhaps  (as  in  the  degeneracy  of  his 
style  and  product,  from  "  He  had  the  typical  vague 
ness  which  is  not  vacuity  and  that  blankness  which  is 
not  simplicity,  that  look  of  being  committed  to  noth 
ing  in  particular,  of  standing  in  an  attitude  of  gen 
eral  expectancy  to  the  chances  of  life,  of  being  very 
much  at  one's  own  disposal,  so  characteristic  of  many 
American  faces  "  in  The  American  to  "  '  The  thing 
is  don't  you  think  —  for  us  not  to  be  so  awfully  clever 
as  to  make  it  believed  that  we  never  can  be  simple. 
We  mustn't  see  to  tremendous  things  '  —  She  quite 
lost  patience  with  the  danger  she  glanced  at.  '  We 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          81 

can  be  simple.  We  can  by  God  '  Mitchy  laughed  " 
in  The  Awkward  Age) —  for  all  this,  perhaps, 
Mr.  James  is  to  be  pitied  rather  than  blamed.  It  is 
not  wholly  his  fault  that  he  has  reached  the  awkward 
age  of  something  like  second  childishness  in  his  lit 
erary  endeavors,  or  that  a  diseased  state  of  mind 
bordering  on  insanity  with  regard  to  the  imputed 
cleverness  of  himself,  his  literary  puppets  and  abet 
tors,  has  taken  firm  hold  on  him. 

It  is  not  wholly  his  fault  that  Boston  and  London 
have  brought  literary  and  social  snobbery  in  him  to 
a  pitch  of  perfection  rarely  (if  ever)  witnessed  be 
fore  ;  that  hardly  a  single  one  of  his  later  more  am 
bitious  productions  can  be  instanced  in  which  there  is 
not  some  hint  or  elaborate  exploitation  of  an  aristo 
cratic  scandal  or  degeneracy,  or  some  glorification  of 
patrician  unearned  increment  and  uninspired  wealth. 

It  is  not  wholly  his  fault  that,  in  TJie  Outcry, 
1911,  this  conscious  or  unconscious  pandering  to 
patrician  pretentiousness  and  self-sufficiency  re 
mains  equally  inveterate  with  the  author's  hopeless 
tendency  to  ingrowing  mannerisms  of  style  such  as : 
"  She  cheerfully  added  .  .  .  '  you'll  get  beautifully 
used  to  it  '  ...  Oh,  he  now  said  it  all  lucidly  ...  if 
not  rather  luridly  —  and  thereby  the  more  tragic 
ally.  He  described  me  in  his  hasty  rage  as  con 
sistently  —  well  heroic.  .  .  .  '  His  rage,'  she  pieced 
it  sympathetically  out.  .  .  .  Lord  Theign  was  more 
and  more  possessed  of  this  view  of  the  manner  of 
it."  All  these  occur  on  page  254  —  and  page  254 
is  not  wholly  or  staringly  exceptional  among  the  rest 
of  the  two  hundred  and  sixty-odd. 

Mr.  James  has  been  encouraged  in  his  production 


82   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  literature  for  the  spiritually  illiterate  by  pub 
lisher's  critics  and  readers  who  have  axes  to  grind  in 
giving  the  public  what  part  of  the  public  assumes 
that  part  of  the  public  wants,  and  by  people  who 
really  believe  that  the  "  spoliation  "  of  English  ducal 
houses,  French  chateaux  and  Italian  palazzi,  of  old 
masters  for  the  American  market,  as  depicted  in  The 
Outcry,  is  one  of  the  capital  crimes  of  history. 

It  is  not  wholly  Mr.  James's  fault  that  he,  like  his 
friends,  has  been  led  by  their  immediate  environ 
ment  to  lay  stress  rather  on  the  shadow  than  the 
substance,  on  the  letter  rather  than  the  spirit  of  the 
law;  and  that  his  point  of  view  with  regard  to  art 
and  life  at  large  is  curiously  reminiscent  of  the  an 
tics  and  psychologic  states  of  newly  initiated  members 
of  college  fraternities  and  high  school  sororities,  or 
the  attitude  of  the  "  Futuristic  "  cult  of  painting 
and  sculpture  in  decadent  Paris  and  Manhattan  in 
this  year  of  the  eternal  human  comedy. 

It  is  not  really  his  fault  that  neither  America  nor 
the  rest  of  the  world  has  taught  him  to  teach  others 
that  a  man  is  a  man  for  all  that,  and  that  a  woman 
may  be  a  success  and  honor  of  her  sex  and  race  in 
spite  of  all  handicaps,  whether  she  be  born  in  the  pur 
ple,  in  the  upper  middle  class  mediocrity  of  the  cul 
ture  that  apes  the  patrician,  in  the  sweat  shops  of 
New  York,  or  in  the  slums  of  Whitechapel. 

It  is  not  wholly  his  fault  that  his  mind,  for  all  its 
superficial  modernity,  remains  of  that  essentially 
mediaeval  order  that  fails  to  differentiate  between  an 
English  duke,  a  continental  royalty  or  near-royalty, 
a  king's  son  from  Zanzibar  or  Fiji,  a  Gravesend  dock 
laborer,  a  retired  merchant  traveling  abroad  from 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          83 

Oshkosh  or  Oklahoma,  a  Parisian  roue  or  playwright 
of  greater  or  less  prominence,  a  London  bank  clerk 
or  cashier,  a  multi-millionaire  from  South  Africa  or 
South  Brooklyn,  and  their  feminine  counterparts  — 
not  in  virtue  of  any  hereditary  or  acquired  handles 
to  their  names,  any  transitory  and  artificial  trap 
pings  of  rank  or  harness  of  fashion,  any  accidental 
reflection  cast  by  the  gold  that  drips  color,  or  any 
vicarious  obscurity  in  the  shadow  of  that  aureate 
light,  but  simply  and  solely  as  human  beings:  prod 
ucts  and  factors  of  evolutionary  environment  and  the 
elemental  rise  of  man ;  tenants  and  stewards  in  great 
or  in  little  of  the  earth  and  its  fullness  that  belong  to 
us  all ;  and  of  the  fruits  of  the  labors,  the  sufferings, 
the  warfares  and  aspirations,  the  arts  and  the  sci 
ences,  the  joys  and  the  sorrows  of  humanity  through 
the  ages. 

Just  how  far  Mr.  James  has  failed  to  realize  and 
remember  this,  just  how  much  or  little  he  has  done, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  to  cherish  and  affirm 
the  errors  and  superstitions  of  the  past,  and  the  pre 
tenses  and  the  perversions  of  the  present,  must  be 
taken  into  account  in  any  final  estimate  of  his  life 
and  work. 

Obviously  the  time  for  that  has  not  yet  come. 
However,  we  may  suggest  in  closing,  that  if  he  had 
devoted  more  time  and  attention  to  the  results  of 
modern  science  and  applied  sociology  in  America  and 
in  London  itself  during  the  last  twenty  years,  and 
less  to  those  features  of  the  great  London  pageant 
that  our  country  women  of  whom  we  are  least  proud 
have  helped  in  no  inexpensive  degree  to  vulgarize 
during  the  same  period,  the  result  in  his  critical  and 


84   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

literary  output  alone,  might  have  been  at  least  a  lit 
tle  less  disastrous. 

London  as  the  seat  of  empire,  as  the  heart  and 
brain  of  half  the  English-speaking  world,  Mr.  James 
has  evidently  found  too  crude  for  his  taste.  Obvi 
ously  the  fault  lies  not  in  and  with  London  alone. 
English  politics  and  English  diplomacy  abroad,  he 
informs  us  seriously  in  The  Tragic  Muse,  are  of 
comparatively  little  consequence  beside  a  doubtful 
London  stage  success  or  a  career  as  a  fashionable 
London  portrait  painter.  All  of  which,  like  the  rest 
of  the  book  by  many  considered  his  best,  is  interesting 
as  indicative  of  the  exceptional  obliquity  and  opacity 
of  a,  temperament  rather  than  as  throwing  any  real 
light  on  the  academic  questions  at  issue. 

The  trouble  with  Mr.  James  is  that  first  and  last 
the  women  have  spoiled  him  as  they  continue  to  spoil 
the  majority  of  his  adorers  and  imitators;  as  they 
inevitably  spoil,  sooner  or  later,  any  man  who  takes 
himself  over-seriously,  whose  relations  with  them  are 
elaborately  artificial,  who  is  willing  and  able  to  pose 
as  a  prophet  or  a  false  prophet  among  them. 

If  nature  and  education  had  pitchforked  Henry 
James  at  a  tender  age  into  a  Middle  West  public 
school,  a  Far  West  mining  camp  or  cattle  range ;  or 
even  into  their  most  strenuous  parallels  in  Eastern 
America:  Henry  James,  if  fit  to  survive,  with  his 
unquestioned  natural  abilities,  might  have  become 
something  like  a  literary  light  of  the  first  magnitude. 
Or  —  like  the  majority  of  his  fellow  countrymen,  he 
might  have  concluded  that  his  energies  could  be  more 
profitably  employed  along  some  other  line  of  activity. 

As  it  is,  the  women  read  him,  or  pretend  to  read 


HENRY  JAMES:  EXPATRIATE          85 

him.  They  buy  or  ask  for  his  books  at  the  public 
libraries  —  when  they  are  bought  or  asked  for  at  all, 
save  by  the  more  adventurous  or  idle  spirits,  young 
or  old,  who  have  time,  patience  and  money  to  employ 
in  the  collection  of  literary  curiosities.  To  such  we 
may  safely  recommend,  in  addition  to  many  of  the 
works  already  named,  The  Two  Magics,  In  the  Cage, 
What  Malsie  Knew,  The  Soft  Side,  The  Better 
Sort  and  The  Outcry,  as  sufficiently  curious  —  and 
inconsequential. 

Henry  James  has  been  spoiled  by  the  women  who 
have  used  him  directly  and  indirectly,  consciously 
and  unconsciously,  to  exploit  and  advertise  their  own 
shallow  literary  and  social  pretensions.  With  the 
American  women  of  the  class  of  which  America  is 
least  proud  we  will  deal  more  directly  in  our  con 
sideration  of  David  Graham  Phillips.  In  the  mean 
time  we  shall  venture  to  suggest  that  we  Americans 
of  both  sexes  have  a  false  and  perverted  pride  in  go 
ing  the  limit,  in  making  world's  records  in  all  things, 
good  and  bad. 

Our  business  and  political  corruption  is  abominable : 
it  is  also  abominable  on  the  most  wholesale  and  pro 
gressive  scale  that  ever  happened.  Similarly  with 
our  divorce  court  statistics,  and  those  of  preventable 
deaths  and  injury  in  our  mines  and  factories,  on  our 
railroads  and  our  public  streets. 

This  may  all  be  a  part  of  our  great  national  joke 
that  helps  to  keep  us  sane  in  the  midst  of  such 
perils. 

Certainly,  when  we  turn  to  the  more  distinctly 
feminine  perversions  of  the  American  progressive  in 
tellect  —  like  the  absurdities  of  X  Science ;  the  super- 


86   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

lative  idiocies,  in  detail,  of  the  agitation  for  Votes  for 
Women  in  New  York ;  the  barbarities  of  fashions  for 
women  on  Broadway  and  Fifth  Avenue,  and  the  in 
congruities  of  culture  for  culture's  sake,  as  pro 
claimed  by  Mr.  James  and  his  most  extreme  Ameri 
can  adherents  —  the  minds  of  gods  and  men  may  be 
moved  once  more  to  something  like  cosmic  and  Lin- 
colnian  laughter. 


Ill 

WILLIAM    DEAN    HOWELLS   AND   ALTRURIA 

"  Science  is  the  emancipator,  the  deliverer,  the  mighty 
equalizer  and  leveler  —  equalizing  and  leveling  up.  Not  down 
but  up,  always  up.  Not  by  making  the  rich  poor,  but  by 
making  the  poor  rich.  Not  by  making  the  wise  foolish,  but 
by  making  the  foolish  wise.  .  .  .  For  signs  of  the  world's  to 
morrow,  look  not  in  the  programmes  of  political  parties,  not 
in  the  plottings  of  princes  or  plutocrats,  but  in  the  crucible 
of  the  chemist."  David  Graham  Phillips,  The  Reign  of  Gilt, 
1905. 

HERE  is  where  Mr.  Howells  has  missed  his  chance 
and  that  trend  of  the  whole  world  movement  of  the 
last  sixty  years,  which  his  limited  artistic  creed  has 
tried  faithfully  to  represent  and  foreshadow  in  the 
kind  of  fiction  that  he  considers  American  and  real 
istic  ;  in  the  novelized  dreams  of  an  ideal  that  he  finds 
unattainable  here  and  to-day ;  and  in  letters  from  a 
land  that  he  surrounds  with  the  shadowy  mists  of  un 
certainty  and  of  a  spirituality  dissipating  itself  in 
vague  longings  that  never  lead  its  interpreter  or  his 
readers  to  any  permanent,  practicable  or  construc 
tive  point  d'appui. 

The  trouble  with  Mr.  Howells  is  that,  though  his 
method  is  realistic  under  limitations  that  A  Hazard 
of  New  Fortunes  permanently  defines,  he  remains 
from  start  to  finish  incurably  a  sentimentalist  of  a 
type  that  is  passing  as  inevitably  in  America  as  the 
idle  rich  are  passing:  the  type  drawn  to  the  life  in 

87 


88       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

many  of  his  own  books,  in  the  Massachusetts  family 
of  Mr.  Henry  James's  The  Europeans,  and  in 
numerable  short  stories  and  novels  of  rudimentary 
American  environment  of  the  school  exemplified  by 
Mary  E.  Wilkins  Freeman,  Sarah  Orne  Jewett, 
Elizabeth  Stuart  Phelps,  Margaret  Deland  and 
others  who  have  farmed  out  the  rocky  and  barren  soil 
of  literary  New  England  by  methods  equally  inten 
sive  and  unscientific,  to  the  verge  of  exhaustion  — - 
after  our  prevalent  national  tendency  to  penny  wise 
and  pound  foolish  measures  in  agriculture  and  other 
cultures. 

This  kind  of  thing  has  produced  in  its  time  notable 
individual  growths  and  characterizations,  but  never, 
save  in  the  exceptional  instances  of  Hawthorne  and 
The  Scarlet  Letter,  the  best  of  Emerson  and  a 
little  of  Lowell,  anything  of  world  permanency  in 
literature.  At  present  the  soil  of  literary  New  Eng 
land  —  which  to-day  extends  in  one  way  or  another 
from  Gower  Street  and  the  South  Kensington  Mu 
seum,  the  "  Quartier  Latin  "  and  the  Sorbonne,  to 
Seattle  and  Los  Angeles,  via  Boston,  New  York, 
Washington  and  other  cities  and  towns  farther  West 
— has  been  harried  and  curried,  raked,  screened, 
sifted  and  resifted,  sowed  and  reaped,  realized  and 
idealized  to  the  point  of  exhaustive  monotony. 

New  materials,  new  fertilizers,  are  in  process  of  ap 
plication  however;  Irish  and  French  Canadian  immi 
gration  has  been  reenforced  by  forty  or  more  indis 
criminate  European,  African  and  Asiatic  factors  in 
the  New  England  of  to-morrow;  and  on  the  whole, 
as  the  general  level  of  intelligence  and  good  will,  ap 
plied,  unapplied,  and  misapplied,  still  remains  rather 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  89 

higher  there  than  on  many  less  favored  portions 
of  the  planet's  surface,  the  future  of  literary  New 
England  may  safely  be  left  to  itself,  save  in  so  far  as 
it  affects  the  interests  of  the  nation  at  large,  and  save 
in  so  far  as  it  continues  to  produce  men  like  Mr. 
Howells  and  Mr.  James,  who  in  one  way  or  another  — 
in  one  case  with  the  best  will  in  the  world  —  contrive 
to  misrepresent  themselves  and  us  on  something  like 
a  national  or  international  scale. 

It  is  true  that  Mr.  Howells  was  born  in  Ohio,  that 
he  has  lived  much  abroad  and  in  that  suburb  of 
European  misapprehension  and  expenditure,  that 
province  of  pretense,  which  the  world  knows  as  twen 
tieth  century  New  York. 

For  all  this,  the  dominant  influences  in  his  life  have 
been  Boston  plus_JTolstoi.  He  remains  to  this  day, 
like  most  of  the  men  and  women  in  his  books,  an  upper 
middle  class  New  Englander  by  spiritual  descent,  en 
larged  indeterminately,  softened  and  ennobled  and 
the  same  time  relaxed  in  fiber  —  at  once  refined  and 
blunted  in  application,  by  the  wider  horizons  and  the 
haze  of  idealism  emanating  from  the  great  plains, 
West  and  East,  that,  in  one  way  or  another,  have  en 
tered  into  his  life  and  possessed  it. 

To  the  evolutionary  historian  and  literary  biogra 
pher  of  the  future  one  of  the  most  fascinating  fields 
of  original  and  human  research  is  barely  opening  up 
to-day.  Such  a  student,  given  time  and  scope  in  his 
chosen  study,  might  very  well  devote  a  lifetime  to 
showing  how  far  we  are  products  of  climate  and  en 
vironment,  and  representative  types  of  the  same  — 
higher  as  well  as  lower ;  spiritually  as  well  as  physic 
ally  ;  in  our  material  conformation,  in  our  index  and 


90   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

formula  of  character,  in  our  success  or  failure  at 
focusing  life  and  its  meaning  and  purpose,  in  detail 
and  in  the  mass. 

It  might  show  that  the  man  of  New  England,  of 
its  mountains  and  hills,  like  all  mountaineers  that 
have  figured  largely  in  history,  is  naturally  direct 
and  tenacious,  nimble  of  wit,  prone  to  make  up  his 
mind  quickly,  or  to  act  inflexibly  on  inherited  con 
victions,  and  acutely  conscious  of  the  value  of  time 
and  money  and  all  that  he  believes  to  be  his  lawful 
rights  and  privileges  to  the  last  cent,  second,  and 
minor  sub-division  of  parliamentary  and  ecclesiastic 
procedure. 

He  sees  a  height  to  be  scaled,  a  tree  to  be  cut 
down,  a  crop  to  be  harvested ;  he  sets  out  to  scale  it, 
to  achieve  results  under  handicaps  and  limitations 
imposed  partly  by  nature,  partly  by  himself;  he  suc 
ceeds,  or  he  fails  and  starts  again :  if  he  is  typical  of 
the  best  of  his  breed,  he  succeeds,  within  his  limita 
tions,  sooner  or  later,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten. 

Environment  and  heredity  combine  to  mold  him  in 
the  habit  of  mind  that  sets  a  definite  goal  and  ideal 
before  him,  and  that  understands  imperfectly,  and 
has  scant  sympathy,  with  all  who  fail  to  focus  things 
as  he  and  his  do. 

In  the  narrower  duties  and  obligations  of  life  he 
is  apt  to  respect  his  neighbor's  landmarks  and  hold 
ings  as  his  own.  The  narrowness  of  forest  clearings 
and  of  hillside  farms,  and  mutual  binding  together 
for  protection  against  the  tyrannies  o*f  weather  and 
man-made  aggression,  have  combined  to  cultivate  this 
frame  of  mind  in  him  from  the  start. 

At  the  same  time  nature  and  racial  heredity,  the 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  91 

intense  stillness  and  whiteness  of  the  northern  win 
ter,  the  sublimity  of  his  White  Mountains,  the  si 
lences  and  the  murmurs  of  the  forest  and  the  sea, 
have  bred  in  him  a  sense  of  the  world  unseen,  which, 
softened  from  its  first  Puritan  rigors  of  predestina 
tion  and  infant  damnation,  diffuses  itself  in  the 
transcendentalism  of  Emerson  and  the  Swedenbor- 
gians ;  escapes  across  the  Atlantic  into  the  vacuous 
elaboration  of  Mr.  James's  later  microscopic  studies ; 
and  culminates  at  home,  superficially,  in  the  supersti 
tions  of  malicious  animal  magnetism,  and  the  rest  of 
the  effeminate  and  woman-fostered  trend  of  thought 
for  more  than  two  centuries,  to  which  Christian  Sci 
ence  with  all  its  ills  is  heir. 

It  would  be  unjust  to  Mr.  Howells  to  compare  his 
social  philosophy  and  its  indeterminate  application 
to  the  system  of  pseudo-theology  elaborated  by  Mary 
Baker  Glover  Eddy  in  Science  and  Health  and  in 
her  later  revelations ;  but  there  is  the  same  pathetic 
tendency  in  both  —  more  prevalent  in  America  yes 
terday  than  to-day,  but  characteristic  of  a  certain 
type  of  people  conventionally  "  good "  in  all  cen 
turies  and  civilized  lands :  the  temperamental  need  to 
believe  everybody  and  everything  better  than  they 
really  are;  the  temperamental  softness  which,  when 
confronted  with  the  crude  brutalities  of  human  exist 
ence,  compromises  by  evading  the  direct  issues  that 
confront  us  as  men,  as  citizens,  and  as  free  intelli 
gences  ;  by  refusing  to  look  life  squarely  in  the  face, 
by  drawing  aside  from  it  as  much  as  may  be,  by  blind 
ing  one's  eyes  and  those  of  one's  disciples  to  the  con 
crete  problems  that  humanity  must  meet  and  solve, 
somehow,  here  and  now ;  by  drugging  itself  with 


92       LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

shadowy  dreams  and  illusive  hopes  of  a  hereafter,  of 
a  heaven  and  a  home,  whose  streets  are  paved  with 
gold,  and  whose  walls  are  builded  with  jasper,  onyx, 
chalcedony,  chrysolite  and  sapphire ;  the  physical 
existence  of  which  in  the  exact  form  symbolized  by 
the  author  of  the  "  Apocalypse  "  is,  to  say  the  least, 
problematic,  and  characteristic  of  the  Israelitish  ra 
cial  concept  that  inspired  it. 

This  kind  of  weakness  develops  strength  of  a  sort. 
It  did  when  it  filled  the  eremites'  burrows  of  the 
Thebiad  and  the  monasteries  of  mediaeval  Europe. 
It  does  when  it  fills  such  of  our  churches  as  are  still 
filled  to-day,  once  a  week  or  once  a  month,  with  well- 
meaning  people  who  devoutly  believe  that  New  York 
and  the  rest  of  America  is  going  to  the  devil  for  the 
time  being,  and  that  neither  they  nor  all  their 
prayers,  nor  God  and  all  His  angels  apparently,  can 
prevail  to-day  against  the  powers  of  darkness  here 
on  earth. 

Neither  their  faith  nor  that  of  Mr.  Howells  is  of 
that  sterner  fiber  that  moves  mountains  literally; 
that  tunnels  them  through;  that  shreds  them  away 
under  its  stamp  mills  and  its  steam  shovels ;  that  justi 
fies  itself  through  its  public  works  like  the  Panama 
Canal  and  the  standardizing  of  transcontinental  rail 
road  systems,  sure  that  whatever  the  faults  and  mis 
takes  of  means  and  methods,  this  too  is  service  in  the 
broadest  and  highest  degree  acceptable  to  humanity 
and  the  great  first  cause  that  inspires  it. 

All  this  is  not  to  say  that  we  should  interpret  too 
narrowly  Mr.  Howells's  Traveller  from  Altruria, 
Letters  of  an  Altrurian  Traveller,  Through  the 
Eye  of  a  Needle,  or  the  spirit  that  informs  most  of 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  93 

his  later  books.  But  these  great  public  works  and 
services,  engineered,  financed  and  managed  on  a  trans 
continental  and  national  scale,  are  some  of  the  things, 
like  the  social,  political  and  economic  problems  un 
derlying  them,  which  his  faith  did  not  find  time  or 
means  to  grasp  or  to  graphically  present  at  any 
period  of  his  career.  He  did  not  find  the  time,  he 
did  not  find  the  patience,  even  to  try  to  grasp  and 
present  them. 

All  this  is  less  the  author's  own  fault,  doubtless, 
than  that  of  his  environment.  Mr.  Howells  was 
born  at  Martins  Ferry,  Ohio,  in  1837,  on  that 
frontier  of  indecision  between  East  and  West,  be 
tween  yesterday  and  to-morrow,  which  Ohio  and  the 
class  that  Ohio  stands  for  have  come  to  represent 
in  American  and  in  World  Politics.  The  same  State 
which  produced  him,  evolved  also  William  McKin- 
ley  and  William  Howard  Taft,  to  go  no  farther  into 
the  list  of  men  of  the  same  type  who  have  been  rep 
resented  of  late,  from  time  to  time,  in  the  attitude 
popularly  described  as  lying  with  one  ear  to  the 
ground. 

In  his  younger  days  Mr.  Howells  worked  as  as 
sistant  to  a  country  newspaper  editor  who  happened 
to  be  his  father,  and  in  other  country  newspaper  of 
fices.  Here  it  is  possible  that  he  gained  something 
of  the  breadth  of  the  men  of  the  plains  without 
having  forced  upon  him,  ground  into  him,  schooled 
and  disciplined  in  him  by  the  stress  of  circumstance, 
the  strength  and  the  faith  that  moves  mountains,  and 
the  energy  that  is  impelled  to  go  ahead  and  never 
let  up  till  the  mountain  is  removed. 

For  the  plains  build  largely,  as  their  horizons  and 


94   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

their  ample  resources  are  large.  History  has  been 
made,  on  the  surface,  by  the  men  of  the  mountains 
and  of  the  sea.  The  tide  moves  and  turns,  eastward, 
westward,  north  or  south,  at  Thermopylae,  at 
Marathon,  at  Tours,  at  Chalons,  at  Waterloo,  at 
Gettysburg.  Certain  surface  currents  and  greater  or 
lesser  eddies  and  eminences  of  the  moment  delude  the 
older  historians  into  defining  epochs  arbitrarily,  as 
nations  used  to  make  maps,  in  terms  of  certain  emi 
nent  men,  certain  dynastic  changes,  emergencies,  sub 
sidences. 

Modern  evolutionary  history,  exemplified  in  books 
like  Brooks  Adams's  The  New  Empire  and  The 
Law  of  Civilization  and  Decay,  is  teaching  us  to 
look  for  the  evolutionary  causes,  for  the  primary 
reasons  why  the  tides  in  the  affairs  of  men  and 
nations  turn  and  waver  when  they  do,  as  they 
do. 

We  cannot  blame  Mr.  Howells  any  more  than  we 
can  blame  the  men  and  women  of  his  generation  in 
discriminately,  because  they  have  been  blind  to  this 
new  science  and  application  of  science.  But  We  can 
blame  him  and  others  who  have  done  as  he  did,  when 
he  took  the  line  of  least  resistance,  when  he  drifted 
to  Europe  and  renounced  the  greater  part  of  his 
birthright  for  a  mess  of  Transatlantic  culture,  when 
he  remained  there  as  United  States  consul  at  Venice 
from  '61  to  '65,  when  he  drifted  to  New  York  to 
edit  (or  help  edit)  The  Nation,  to  Boston  to  edit  the 
Atlantic  Monthly,  and  back  to  New  York  to  help 
edit  Harper's  Magazine,  and  in  one  way  or  another 
to  act  as  corporation  counsel  to  the  policy  of  the 
great  publishing  house,  with  which  in  one  way  or 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  95 

another  he  has  been  so  long  and  so  intimately  asso 
ciated. 

We  can  hardly  blame  him  more  than  the  other 
American  men  and  women  of  his  type  and  the  class 
that  he  represents,  for  remaining  consistently 
throughout  the  Quaker  rather  than  the  Puritan  re 
former  in  art  and  ethics,  for  making  of  Harper's 
Magazine  and  the  whole  surrounding  atmosphere^  a 
literary  old  woman's  home,  and  a  nursery  for  girls 
and  boys  whose  sense  of  literature  and  of  life  has 
been  considerably  more  effeminate  than  virile,  to  put 
the  case  very  mildly  indeed.  So  far,  to  a  large  ex 
tent,  Mrs.  Atherton  has  right  and  reason  on  her  side 
in  her  dispute  with  him. 

The  exact  merits  of  that  contention  do  not  interest 
us  greatly  here  or  hereafter.  What  does  concern 
us  is  the  fact  that  Mr.  Howells  has  so  far  misread, 
and  tried  so  long  to  misinterpret,  the  meaning  and 
purpose  of  history,  of  evolution,  of  civilization,  of 
democracy,  of  science :  in  the  land  that  produced  him, 
and  in  the  rest  of  the  world  at  large,  and  under  ad 
vantages  that  for  some  men  might  have  been  found 
exceptional,  if  not  ideal. 

Though  history  on  the  surface  seems  to  have  been 
made  by  the  men  of  the  mountains  and  the  sea,  by 
the  aristocracies,  by  the  summits  and  the  outer  ed 
dies  of  the  great  human  tidal  wave  that  began  to 
sweep  round  the  world  from  East  to  West  more  than 
eight  thousand  years  ago,  and  which  is  still  sweep 
ing  on  with  periodic  regressions  and  resurgences  in 
the  direction  in  which  it  started,  history  in  its  es 
sence,  in  its  deeper  and  controlling  currents,  depends 
upon  the  men  and  women  of  the  great  plains  and 


96   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

major  river  valleys  of  the  earth's  surface;  and  upon 
the  industrial  development  of  the  great  masses  of 
men,  forced  by  their  environment,  whatever  their 
temporary  political  or  ecclesiastical  formula,  to  be 
democratic  and  neighborly  at  bottom  in  their  social 
attitude.  And  so  it  always  will. 

So  the  valleys  of  the  Tigris  and  Euphrates  were 
irrigated  till  the  desert  blossomed  like  the  rose.  So 
the  Pyramids  were  built,  and  later  the  great  wall  of 
China.  So  the  racial  destinies  of  the  future  are  to 
be  settled,  unless  all  signs  fail,  on  the  high  seas,  in 
the  crucibles  of  the  chemist,  in  the  minds  and  hearts 
of  the  world's  highest  and  lowest  evolutionary  types ; 
on  many  a  mountain  pass  and  height  of  vision  doubt 
less  ;  but,  in  the  main,  on  the  great  plains  and  pampas 
of  North  and  South  America,  on  the  plains  and 
steppes  of  European  Russia,  in  the  great  river  val 
leys  of  China  and  Africa,  and  in  the  varying  de 
grees  and  intensities  of  industrial  civilization,  ef 
ficient,  scientific,  making  for  righteousness  and  the 
square  deal  in  the  long  run,  that  these  localities  are 
capable  of  evolving  and  of  fitting  to  survive. 

Civilization  is  not  all  a  failure  and  a  retrogression 
and  a  tragic  procession  between  two  blank  eternities, 
though  men  like  Mark  Twain  and  Tolstoland  Mr. 

lerwise.  The  very 

>y  who  rushes  ahead  of  his  nearest  trade  rivals 
to  sell  the  dean  of  American  literature  the  yellowest 
yellow  journal,  or  the  most  hide-bound  and  prosti 
tuted  Wall  Street  sheet  that  his  hands  have  been 
known  to  touch,  knows  better,  in  his  minor  message 
and  service,  than  our  pessimistic  prophet  of  Altruria 
Absolute. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  97 

The  great  men  of  the  plains,  moral  and  material, 
whose  natures  grow  and  flow  and  widen  slowly  and 
surely  as  their  rivers  widen ;  that  rise  slowly  from 
the  mass  as  a  pyramid  rises ;  that  become  despots,  yet 
servants  of  the  masses  through  force  of  circumstance 
and  environment ;  the  robber  barons  of  yesterday,  of 
to-day  and  of  to-morrow ;  the  Alexanders,  the  Caesars, 
the  Justinians,  the  Napoleons ;  the  bringers  of  order 
from  anarchy,  the  captains  of  industry,  the  reor- 
ganizers,  the  conquerors  and  codifiers  of  all  time: 
these  know  and  realize,  after  their  varying  capacities, 
the  fact  that  civilization  has  neither  failed  nor  suc 
ceeded  finally ;  that  it  is  neither  a  funeral  mass  nor  a 
triumphal  procession ;  that  it  is  at  once  a  pilgrimage 
and  a  truceless  war,  never  to  be  ended  while  human 
life  exists  on  this  earth.  They  demonstrate  through 
their  life  and  work  that  one  essential  appetite  and 
one  persistent  passion  of  the  spirit  of  dominance  and 
service,  of  nature  and  the  elements,  of  one's  fellow 
men  and  wromen,  and  of  life  itself,  remains,  and  must 
remain,  to  be  curbed  and  disciplined  by  the  mind  of 
man  that  exists  in  and  through,  and  rises  to  mastery 
by  virtue  of,  its  appetites  and  passions. 

It  makes  comparatively  little  difference  here  just 
how  far  Leo  Tolstoi  in  his  more  recent  writings  has 
diverged  from  this  theory  of  evolutionary  and  his 
toric  truth.  Tolstoi  in  his  later  years,  in  his  at 
tempted  simplification  of  life  as  he  found  and  saw 
it,  was  as  much  an  evolutionary  product  of  the  soil 
and  the  century  that  bred  him,  as  the  Nihilists,  the 
Terrorists,  the  Russian  grand  dukes,  the  peasant  pro 
prietors  and  the  Greek  Church  ecclesiastics  higher  up, 
the  black  hundreds,  the  Pogroms,  the  Doukhobortsi, 


98   LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  Jew  baitings  and  killings,  the  troops  of  peasants 
whose  theory  of  religious  simplification  was  to  dis 
card  their  clothes  and  go  stark  naked  at  any  and 
every  opportunity,  and  all  the  rest  of  the  emotional 
and  reactionary  factors  that  have  made  life  in  Rus 
sia  and  Siberia  hell  on  earth,  before  and  since  the 
war  with  Japan ;  and  which,  since  the  Convocation  of 
the  first  Duma  and  its  dispersion,  have  apparently 
put  back  the  clock  of  Pan-Slavic  civilization  fifty  or 
one  hundred  years,  when  compared  with  the  rest  of 
the  world. 

There  is  a  certain  likeness  between  the  practices 
of  the  Doukhobortsi  in  shedding  their  clothes  and  sim 
ilar  practices  of  George  Fox  and  his  friends  that 
scandalized  our  own  Puritan  ancestors  in  Colonial 
times,  on  one  side,  and  Mr.  Howells's  attempted  sim 
plification  of  his  inherited  surroundings,  on  the 
other,  which  redounds  wholly  to  the  credit  of  neither. 

We  may  say  of  Tolstoi  that  in  his  later  years  he 
was  a  necessary  voice  of  protest  against  intolerable 
conditions  in  Russia  —  the  modern  equivalent  of  a 
major  Hebrew  prophet  in  a  generation  that  failed 
to  understand  him  as  conclusively  as  he  understood  it. 

We  may  say  of  Quakerism  and  passive  non-resist 
ance  in  general,  that  Pennsylvania  has  been  for  years 
the  one  state  in  the  Union  where  machine  rule  is 
worse  than  in  New  York,  and  where  the  political 
hierarchy  of  the  machine  is  largely  controlled,  op 
erated  and  officered  by  the  native  born. 

It  is  not  so  easy  to  dismiss  Mr.  Howells  and  the 
class  of  Americans  that  has  formed  and  still 
forms  his  most  sympathetic  reading  public,  in  a  single 
sentence  or  a  single  page. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  99 

To  begin  with,  the  work  of  Mr.  Howells,  like  that 
of  other  well-known  writers  who  have  written  for  half 
a  century  or  more  and  have  manifested  during  that 
time  a  certain  capacity  for  growth,  may  be  divided 
into  at  least  two  distinct  periods.  During  all  this 
time,  as  he  changes,  or  fails  to  change,  his  readers 
and  the  rest  of  the  world  change  or  fail  to  change 
with  him. 

There  have  been  many  marvelous  eras  of  expan 
sion  before  the  last  fifty  years,  some  of  them  pyro- 
technically  rapid  in  the  history  of  the  human  mind 
and  its  activities :  periods,  to  go  no  farther  back,  as 
the  Reformation,  the  Renaissance,  the  Revolutions  in 
America  and  France.  But  never  since  literature 
began  to  be  written  have  literary  men  been  privileged 
to  live  through  the  end  of  one  epoch  and  the  begin 
ning  of  a  new  one,  so  crucially  reconstructive,  or 
to  see  science  literally  reforming  and  rebuilding  the 
earth  and  the  richness  thereof,  with  the  bodies,  the 
minds  and  the  souls  of  men,  as  those  of  Mark  Twain's 
and  Mr.  Howells's  race  and  generation  have  been 
privileged. 

If  men  of  Mark  Twain's  essential  integrity  and 
keenness  of  vision,  in  literature  and  out  of  it,  have 
not  been  permitted  to  focus  things  as  many  of  us 
to-day  begin  to  focus  things  —  if  comparatively  few 
of  the  world's  great  literary  men  and  interpreters 
elsewhere  have  gone  on  record  publicly  as  Mr. 
Howells  has  not  —  obviously  we  must  not  blame  him 
and  his  disciples  too  far. 

And  yet  he  has  known  something  about  sociology, 
or  tried  to,  and  he  tells  us  that  he  never  succeeded  in 
drawing  Mark  Twain  into  a  sociological  discussion. 


100     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

He  does  not  tell  us  that  he  never  entered  into 
scientific  discussion  or  serious  study  of  sociology's 
problems  himself,  but  we  do  know  that  science  as  a 
serious  factor,  or  evolutionary  element,  is  distinctly 
negligible  and  neglected  in  his  books.  He  has  writ 
ten  about  business  life  and  journalism  in  A  Modern 
Instance,  Silas  Lapham  and  A  Hazard  of  New  For 
tunes;  he  has  touched  on  medical  life,  on  sociology 
and  the  ethics  of  defalcation,  in  Dr.  Breen's  Prac 
tice,  Annie  Kilburn,  and  The  Quality  of  Mercy; 
he  has  made  tentative  sallies  into  the  world  of 
art,  literature  and  the  stage  in  The  Coast  of  Bo 
hemia,  The  World  of  Chance  and  The  Story  of  a 
Play,  while  the  travel  motive  of  Americans  abroad 
and  at  home  has  been  material  for  him  from  the 
days  of  Their  Silver  Wedding  Journey  and  Lady 
of  Aroostook:  but  science  as  an  inspiring  and 
informing  factor  and  feature  of  American  life,  in 
the  laboratory,  in  the  clinic,  in  the  slum,  in  its 
larger  and  lesser  commercial  developments  and  as 
pects,  in  its  cruder  and  more  subtle  organizations 
and  re-organizations,  has  been  a  sealed  book  to  him. 

The  man  himself  has  suffered  for  it.  The  major 
ity  of  his  readers,  many  of  his  warmest  partisans, 
have  suffered  similarly  consciously  or  unconsciously; 
and  we  who  have  been  privileged  to  see  him  at  his 
best  —  and  his  worst  —  as  novelist  and  as  critic  of 
literature  and  of  life,  have  a  just  cause  for  com 
plaint  at  this  blind  side  of  what  in  many  other 
respects  is  an  admirable  type  of  the  sterling  Ameri 
canism  of  mind  and  character  that  we  still  instinc 
tively  associate  with  the  word  American  viewed  in  its 
most  admirable  light. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELkS  10J 


n. 

Here  we  may  quote,  with  minor  reservations,  Pro 
fessor  William  Lyon  Phelps  of  Yale  in  his  book,  Es 
says  on  Modern  Novelists,  1910:  "  The  personality 
of  Mr.  Howells  as  shown  both  in  his  objective  work 
and  his  subjective  confessions  ...  a  simple,  demo 
cratic,  unaffected,  modest,  kindly,  humorous  .  .  . 
healthy  soul,  with  a  rare  combination  of  rugged 
(?)  virility  and  extreme  refinement  ";  and  at  greater 
length  Professor  Harry  Thurston  Peck,  formerly  of 
Columbia  University,  in  The  Personal  Equation, 
1898—  "A  quick  eye  for  what  is  striking  in  in 
dividuals  or  in  life,  a  wonderful  photographic  in 
stinct  for  detail,  a  shrewd  insight  into  human  motive, 
a  truly  American  perception  for  the  ludicrous,  a 
natural  gift  of  language,  a  talent  for  crystallizing 
in  a  phrase  or  an  epithet  the  essential  attribute  of 
any  subject,  a  Frenchman's  reverence  for  le  mot 
juste  ...  all  these  superimposed  upon  an  experi 
ence  so  broad  as  to  be  national  rather  than  sectional, 
and  with  the  advantage  of  an  international  point  of 
view,  may  surely  warrant  one  in  saying  what  has  just 
been  said;  that  if  Mr.  Howells  has  not  written  the 
American  Novel  then  no  one  else  has  written  it  ... 
the  limitations  that  have  prevented  Mr.  Howells  from 
attaining  supreme  success  as  a  fiction-writer,  and  that 
have  made  his  general  theory  of  criticism  and  of  life 
inadequate  are  to  be  traced  directly  to  ...  his 
long  residence  in  Boston,  and  .  .  .  his  subsequent 
identification  with  New  York.  .  .  . 

"  Boston  shows  us  ...  a  community  not  directly 
in  touch  with  anything  beyond  its  own  borders,  but 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

very  self-centered  and  compact,  and  taken  up  wholly 
with  its  own  concerns.  Its  colonialism  stands  out  all 
over  it  with  both  the  virtues  and  the  defects  of  its 
qualities.  There  are  all  the  integrity  of  purpose,  all 
the  anxious  uneasiness  about  '  duty,'  the  intense  self- 
respect  and  self-reliance  of  the  New  Englander,  the 
love  of  truth  and  justice,  the  independence  and  the 
rectitude ;  but  there  can  also  be  found  all  the  intol 
erance,  all  the  narrowness,  all  the  impenetrable  com 
placency  and  all  the  intellectual  myopia  of  the  pro 
vincial  Englishman.  .  .  .  Mr.  Howells,  to  be  sure, 
as  well  as  others  is  a  critic  of  literature,  and  he  is  a 
very  searching  and  suggestive  critic,  too,  but  one  can 
not  even  touch  upon  his  literary  criticism  without 
feeling  that  in  reality  it  is  but  a  part,  and  a  com 
paratively  unimportant  part  of  his  wider  criticism  of 
life,  and  that  the  same  is  true  of  every  phase  of  his 
intellectual  activity  when  regarded  separately  and 
alone.  .  .  .  This  is  the  true  New  England  tempera 
ment,  rooted  in  individualism,  pushing  self-analysis 
to  the  point  of  torture,  regarding  details  as  of  in 
finite  significance,  teaching  that  the  part  is  greater 
than  the  whole,  and  robbing  its  possessor  of  a  sense 
of  true  proportion.  But  to  the  literary  artist  as  to 
the  philosopher  the  sense  of  proportion  is  everything ; 
for  it  is  the  one  sovereign  antidote  to  provincialism, 
philistinism  and  morbidity." 

This  brings  us  back  to  Professor  Phelps  again. 
"  His  artistic  creed  is  narrow,  strict  and  definite. 
He  has  expressed  it  in  his  essays  and  exemplified  it 
in  his  novels.  His  two  doctrinal  works,  Criticism 
and  Fiction  and  My  Literary  Passions,  resemble 
Zola's  Le  Roman  Experimental  in  dogmatic  lim- 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  103 

itations.  The  creed  of  Mr.  Howells  is  realism,  which 
he  has  not  only  followed  faithfully  in  his  creative 
work,  but  which  he  uses  as  a  standard  by  which  to 
measure  the  value  of  other  novelists,  both  living  and 
dead.  .  .  .  Mr.  Howells's  literary  estimates  of  other 
men's  work  are  far  more  valuable  as  self-revelation 
than  as  adequate  appraisal.  Indeed,  some  of  his 
criticisms  are  bizarre.  .  .  .  Broadly  speaking  he  has 
not  the  true  critical  mind." 

Mr.  Howells  begins  well  in  Criticism  and  Fic 
tion  by  quoting  from  The  Renaissance  in  Italy, 
by  John  Addington  Symonds :  "  Our  hope  is  that 
all  sentimental  or  academical  seekings  after  the  ideal 
having  been  abandoned  .  .  .  nothi 
what  is  solid  and  possible,  the  scientific  spirit  shall 
make  men  progressively  more  and  more  conscious  of 
these  eternal  relations  ...  we  shall  come  to  com 
prehend  with  more  instinctive  celeritude  what  is 
simple,  natural  and  honest.  .  .  .  The  perception  of 
the  enlightened  man  will  then  be  the  task  of  a 
healthy  person  who  has  made  himself  acquainted 
with  the  laws  of  evolution  in  art  and  society." 

Mr.  Howells,  in  common  with  many  other  milk-and- 
water,  or  fire-and-sword  Socialists,  in  art  and  in  life, 
has  not  made  himself  fully  acquainted  with  these  same 
laws  of  evolution,  and  shows  no  signs  of  trying  to. 
He  goes  on  to  tell  us  about  the  strangeness  of  the 
charm  that  fashion  has  had  at  one  period  or  another, 
in  woman's  clothes  for  example.  Later  he  suggests 
that  the  literary  fashions  set  forth  by  Scott,  Dickens, 
Thackeray  &  Co.,  should  be  'in  our  eyes  to-day  as 
grotesquely  obsolete  as  the  feminine  finery  of  the 
early  and  mid- Victorian  eras.  He  says :  "  I  am  in 


104     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

hopes  that  the  communistic  era  in  taste  ...  is  ap 
proaching."  He  denies  that  literature  and  art  are 
anything  but  the  expression  of  life,  that  they  are  to 
be  judged  by  any  other  test  but  their  fidelity  to  it. 
He  declares :  "  The  time  is  coming,  I  hope,  when 
each  new  author,  each  new  artist,  will  be  considered, 
not  in  his  proportion  to  any  other  author  or  artist, 
but  in  relation  to  the  human  nature  known  to  us  all 
which  is  his  privilege,  his  high  duty  to  interpret." 

This  is  all  very  well  as  far  as  it  goes.  We  do  need 
more  naturalness,  more  simplicity,  more  honesty,  in 
our  literature  as  well  as  our  life,  in  America  to-day. 
But  the  arbitrary  literary  criticism  and  racial  criti 
cism  of  the  past  has  needed  measuring  rules  and 
scales  of  value  as  well  as  a  mirror ;  and  the  most 
advanced  evolutionary  literary  criticism  of  to-day  and 
to-morrow  is  not  going  to  consider  any  author  any 
one  cares  to  name,  simply  in  his  relation  to  the 
axioms  of  spiritual  mathematics  and  his  aesthetic  re 
action  on  the  normal  (in  Mr.  Howells's  acceptation, 
to  most  of  us  the  rather  bromidic)  palate.  Such 
criticism  is  going  to  consider  such  an  author,  as  well 
as  his  works,  in  his  evolutionary  relation  to  the  time 
and  place  that  produces  him  and  his  most  significant 
likenesses  and  dissimilarities  compared  with  his  near 
est  contemporaries  of  importance,  and  with  other 
types,  species  and  individuals,  distant  or  remote  in 
time  and  space,  worthy  for  one  reason  or  other  of 
being  drawn  into  comparison. 

And  as  long  as  literature  exists,  as  long  as  human 
nature  and  the  fiction  that  is  its  most  modern  and  ade 
quate  representative,  continue  substantially  what  they 
are  and  always  have  been;  just  so  long  will  the 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HO  WELLS  105 

types  that  Mr.  Howells  proceeds  to  rail  against  in 
his  criticism  of  Scott,  Dickens,  Thackeray  et  al. —  of 
the  passionate,  the  heroic,  the  grotesque,  the  per 
verted,  the  vicious,  the  adventurous  qualities  of 
the  human  mind  and  soul  —  remain  in  literature  and 
in  life  to  prove  humanity's  greatest  handicaps  and 
stepping-stones  on  its  way  through  life  as  well  as  its 
greatest  inspirations  and  its  greatest  temptations  to 
push  onward  and  upward  inevitably. 

People  who  do  not  get  this  kind  of  thing  in  their 
life  want  it  in  literature  or  in  the  stage;  and  Mr. 
Howells  would  very  quickly  find  that,  if  he  could  sup 
press  utterly  the  habit  of  novel  reading  of  adven 
ture  and  the  seamy  side  (which  he  stigmatizes  as  the 
emptiest  dissipation,  and  considers  about  as  useless 
and  pernicious  as  horse-racing  or  card-playing),  to 
gether  with  all  dramatic  representation  of  all  that  is 
not  simple,  honest  and  natural  from  his  point  of 
view,  men  and  women  both  would  begin  then,  as  they 
did  in  cruder  eras,  to  seek  adventure  at  first  hand  in 
ways  equally  or  even  more  reprehensible  to  him,  but 
also  equally  simple  and  natural,  if  not  always  more 
honest. 

Mr.  Howells  seems  to  forget  from  time  to  time  that 
New  York  and  the  rest  of  America  is  not  a  New  Eng 
land  village  community,  denaturalized  to  some  extent 
by  centuries  of  the  Puritan  conscience  and  the  New 
England  an-aesthetic  attitude. 

He  complains  with  something  of  the  nai've  indigna 
tion  of  a  child  whose  ears  have  been  boxed  unjustly 
for  the  first  time,  that  critics  nowadays  in  New  York 
seem  to  have  no  sense  of  responsibility ;  that,  with  or 
without  orders  by  the  people  that  pay  and  own  them, 


106     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

they  actually  seem  to  enjoy  —  sometimes  —  going 
gunning  for  certain  authors,  or  groups  of  authors, 
and  any  or  all  of  their  works  that  venture  into  the 
open. 

He  might,  about  as  justly  and  to  the  point,  com 
plain  about  the  tactics,  with  few  exceptions,  of  the 
whole  newspaper  and  journalistic  profession;  of  cor 
poration  lawyers  and  their  clients ;  of  society  leaders 
and  climbers  ;  of  ward  politicians,  and  men  and  women 
higher  up,  everywhere  in  our  social,  legal,  political, 
industrial,  journalistic  and  literary  system  of  life  by 
machinery  for  the  millions  —  everywhere  where  the 
misrepresentation  of  truth  can  be  made  a  source  of 
commercial  profit,  or  otherwise  effectively  used  to 
serve  and  exploit  a  special  interest. 

Such  things  we  know,  when  we  care  to  think  of 
them,  are  a  part  of  life  as  it  is  lived  in  America  to 
day,  like  mosquitoes  and  rattlesnakes.  Occasionally, 
when  they  crowd  it  too  far,  society  puts  an  end  to  a 
part  of  its  reptiles  for  the  time  being.  It  takes  longer 
to  abolish  the  insect  pests.  And  Mr.  Howells  shows 
something  of  the  same  kind  of  pertinacious  futility  in 
his  own  critical  intolerance  as  certain  of  his  critics 
have  done. 

The  truth  is  that  life,  as  he  sees  and  misapprehends 
it,  frequently  bores  Mr.  Howells  to-day,  as  it  habit 
ually  bores  Mr.  James,  as  it  is  apt  to  bore  most 
men  who  grow  old  with  the  edge  of  their  vital  ambi 
tions  and  curiosities  blunted  by  failure  to  adjust  their 
own  temperamental  mental  and  moral  processes,  vari 
able  or  inveterate,  to  the  rapidly  changing  condi 
tions  of  nineteenth  and  twentieth  century  environ 
ment. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  107 

Such  was  the  case  with  Tolstoi  himself;  and  while 
his  most  notable  American  disciple  is  very  far  from 
being  the  conventional  septuagenarian  laudator 
temporis  acti,  nature  has  had  its  way  with  him :  while 
he  finds  little  in  the  American  present  and  future,  to 
praise,  little  hope  or  promise,  he  finds,  or  seems  to 
find,  little  more  in  the  past. 

If  the  vital  criterion  of  all  literature  that  lasts  is 
a  strong  and  inspiring  joy  in  life  that  survives 
triumphant  through  all  struggles  and  transient  de 
feats,  then  Mr.  Howells,  like  most  men  and  women 
writing  in  America  or  England  to-day,  falls  very  far 
below  this  test. 

Something  of  this  spirit  and  inspiration  of  Amer 
ica,  unlettered  and  unsung  adequately  so  far,  seems 
to  have  escaped  the  doubtful  scrutiny  of  his  New 
England  consciousness  and  conscientiousness  in  A 
Modern  Instance  and  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham. 

Concerning  the  former,  Professor  Phelps  remarks ; 
"  It  seems  to  me  in  every  way  a  greater  book  than 
Romola"  Professor  Peck:  "Altogether,  one  can 
not  say  too  much  of  A  Modern  Instance.  It  bears 
the  true  stamp  of  genius,  and  it  will  live  as  long 
as  anything  that  American  literature  has  to  show; 
for  in  it  the  writer  stands  aside  and  lets  the 
action  evolve  itself  before  the  reader's  eye.  .  .  . 
Nearly  all  its  characters  are  living,  human  beings 
and  not  mere  psychological  studies.  .  .  .  Bartley 
Hubbard  for  example  is  as  real  as  Mr.  Howells  him 
self." 

Bartley  Hubbard  is,  in  a  very  real  way,  a  very  typ 
ical  American  —  not  strictly  confined  to  New  Eng 
land.  As  Professor  Phelps  diagnoses  him,  he  "  is  just 


108     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

like  thousands  of  clever  young  American  journalists 
.  .  .  quick-witted,  enterprising,  energetic,  with  a  sure 
nose  for  news  ...  he  actually  has  at  heart  no  moral 
principle,  no  ethical  sense,  no  honor. 

"  The  career  of  such  a  man  will  depend  entirely  on 
circumstances,  because  his  standard  of  virtue  is  not 
where  it  should  be,  within  his  own  mind,  but  without. 
Had  he  married  exactly  the  right  sort  of  girl,  and 
had  some  rich  uncle  left  the  young  couple  a  for 
tune.  .  .  .  He  would  have  remained  popular  in  the 
community  and  died  both  lamented  and  respected. 
.  .  .  No  one  who  has  read  the  book  can  possibly 
forget  his  broad  back  as  he  sits  in  the  court  room, 
and  the  horrible  ring  of  fat  that  hangs  over  his  col 
lar  .  .  .  yet  as  one  looks  back  over  his  life,  every 
stage  in  the  transit  is  wholly  natural.  .  .  .  Squire 
Gaylord  is  a  person  of  whose  creation  any  author 
might  feel  proud." 

Professor  Peck  states  that  Marcia,  Kinney  and 
Wetherby  are  living  beings,  too.  "  Mr.  Howells  has 
drawn  them  with  more  freedom  arid  boldness  than  he 
often  shows,  and  has  given  himself  far  less  concern 
about  accumulating  mere  details.  He  has,  moreover, 
in  a  manner,  cut  loose  from  his  pet  theory  of  fiction 
writing.  He  has  not  scrupled  to  give  us  some  fine 
dramatic  touches  after  the  manner  of  the  Romanti 
cists,  and  has  even  led  us  up  to  an  intensely  power 
ful  climax  (in  the  final  court  room  scene). 

*'The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham  is,  as  a  whole,  be 
low  the  level  of  A  Modern  Instance,  but  it  is  still 
a  masterly  and  memorable  book.  The  character  of 
Silas  Lapham  himself  is  by  all  odds  the  most  remark 
able  piece  of  portraiture  that  Mr.  Howells  has  ever 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  109 

done,  and  it  is  the  only  one  that  attains  to  the  pro 
portions  of  a  broadly  national  type.  The  self-made 
man  who  works  his  way  up  the  ladder  of  material 
prosperity  was  never  more  convincingly  depicted ;  and 
the  portrait  is  one  that  is  true  of  the  native  Ameri 
can  everywhere,  East  as  well  as  West.  .  .  .  The 
opening  chapter  where  Lapham  is  interviewed  by 
Bartley  Hubbard  for  The  Events,  in  the  office  of 
the  '  mineral-paint '  manufactory,  is  a  miracle  of 
condensed  pictorial  power,  in  which  each  word  goes 
with  swiftness  and  precision  to  the  mark." 

Here  we  see  something  of  the  joy  of  the  true  artist 
in  his  work,  convincingly  and  on  a  broad  virile  scale. 
Both  books  are  marred  more  or  less  by  the  pessimism 
that  culminates  in  Stops  of  Various  Quills,  and  that 
enfeebles  A  Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  and  most  of 
the  later  books. 

This  pessimism  —  partly  temperamental,  partly 
acquired ;  partly  sentimental,  partly  bred  in  the  bone 
through  the  man's  Welsh  and  New  England  ancestry ; 
partly  enforced  by  machine  rule  in  New  York  —  ap 
pears  also  in  the  earlier  novels.  Here  Mr.  Howells 
seems  to  have  the  instinct  of  inadequacy  that  chooses 
to  sing,  within  its  limitations,  in  a  minor  key.  He 
does  so  charmingly  at  times ;  but  again  the  charm  is 
submerged  by  gloom,  as  in  A  Foregone  Conclusion. 

Of  this  earlier  period  Professor  Phelps  declares 
— "  The  earlier  novels  are  more  purely  artistic ; 
they  are  accurate  representations  of  American  char 
acters,  for  the  most  part  joyous  in  mood,  full  of 
genuine  humor  and  natural  charm.  A  story  abso 
lutely  expressive  of  the  author  as  we  used  to  know 
him  is  Tlie  Lady  of  the  Aroostook.  The  story  is 


110     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

full  of  observation,  cerebration  and  human  affection. 
As  Professor  Beers  has  remarked,  if  Mr.  Howells 
knows  his  countrymen  no  more  intimately  than  does 
Henry  James,  at  least  he  loves  them  better." 

According  to  Professor  Peck  — "  In  The  Lady 
of  the  Aroostook  we  have  the  most  perfect  story 
that  American  literature  has  yet  produced.  It  is 
the  height  of  literary  art,  for  its  finish  is  as  exquisite 
as  its  design  .  .  .  the  book  is  more  than  a  perfect 
story;  it  is  a  concrete  illustration  of  a  phase  of 
American  civilization  ...  it  depicts  social  condi 
tions  that  to  a  foreigner  are  quite  inexplicable  .  .  . 
the  last  three  or  four  pages  would  alone  be  sufficient 
to  make  a  lasting  reputation  for  their  author." 

Something  of  the  same  charm  of  cultured  middle 
class  New  Englanders  on  their  travels  is  found 
notably  in  Indian  Summer  and  Their  Wedding 
Journey.  In  the  latter  book  Mr.  Howells  begins 
to  strike  the  note  of  pessimism  that  later  puts  him 
out  of  court  as  an  artist  and  impartial  witness  to 
life.  This  pessimism  is  an  outgrowth  of  the  New 
England  conscience  plus  sentimentality.  As  travel 
sketches  of  an  undiscovered  country  of  New  Eng 
land  psychology,  as  sociological  notes  of  an  acute 
observer  gradually  unfitted  by  temperament  and  en 
vironment  for  doing  the  big  work  he  once  promised 
to  do,  certain  portions  of  these  books  have  their  per 
manent  value. 

The  following  is  from  Their  Wedding  Journey. 
"  She  wondered  that  the  happiest  women  in  the  world 
can  look  each  other  in  the  face  without  bursting  into 
tears,  their  happiness  is  so  unreasonable  and  so  built 
upon  and  hedged  about  with  misery.  .  .  .  They 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HO  WELLS  111 

particularly  derided  the  idea  of  New  York  being 
loved  by  anyone.  It  was  too  vast,  too  coarse,  too 
restless  .  .  .  endless  blocks  of  brown  stone  fronts 
with  their  eternal  flights  of  brown  stone  steps  op 
pressed  them  like  a  procession  of  houses  trying  to 
pass  a  given  point  and  never  getting  by.  .  .  .  They 
said  that  the  daily  New  York  murder  might  even  at 
that  moment  be  taking  place.  ...  It  was  four 
o'clock,  the  deadliest  hour  of  the  deadly  summer  day 
.  .  .  far  up  and  down  the  street  swept  a  stream  of 
tormented  life.  ...  It  was  a  scene  that  possessed 
the  beholder  with  a  singular  fascination,  and  in  its 
effect  of  universal  lunacy  it  might  well  have  seemed 
the  last  phase  of  a  world  presently  to  be  destroyed." 

Travelers  of  Mr.  Howells's  type  might  have  seen 
something  more,  something  less  insane,  something 
more  vital,  more  inspiring,  more  significant,  even 
in  Broadway,  on  a  hot  summer  afternoon  in  1871,  if 
their  eyes  had  not  been  blinded  by  Boston  blue 
glasses  and  moral  myopia  from  a  Puritan  past. 
People  like  Mr.  Howells  have  a  mental  spectrum  of 
their  own  that  tends  increasingly  toward  the  ultra 
violet  rays.  They  may  not  be  literally  color-blind 
to  all  the  rest,  but  the  harsher  primary  hues  of 
America  in  the  making  cause  them  to  blink  and  re 
coil,  to  turn  their  heads  away  and  tell  themselves 
that  it  really  isn't  done,  shouldn't  be  done,  couldn't 
be  done  in  the  restricted  circles  where  they  find  them 
selves  most  at  home. 

So  he  views  life  on  the  night-boat  to  Albany,  not 
as  an  evolutionary  shuttling  of  diverse  existences, 
but  as  a  crude  and  indigestible  mess  similar  to  the 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

dinner  "  on  the  American  plan  "  that  he  finds  served 
there. 

"  Since  they  could  not  help  it  they  watched  the 
public  provision  which,  leaving  no  interval  between 
disgraceful  squalor  and  ludicrous  splendor,  accom 
modates  our  democratic  menage  to  the  taste  of  the 
richest  and  most  extravagant  plebeian  amongst  us 
...  it  is  this  ruthless  imbecile  who  will  have  lace 
curtains  to  the  steamboat  berth  into  which  he  gets 
with  his  pantaloons  on  ...  it  is  he  who  will  have 
for  supper  that  overgrown  and  shapeless  dinner  in 
the  lower  saloon  ...  it  is  he  who  perpetuates  the 
insolence  of  the  clerk  and  the  reluctance  of  the 
waiters." 

However,  our  two  Bostonians  who  married  late  in 
life  and  put  off  so  obvious  a  thing  as  a  wedding 
journey  for  years,  finally  reach  Niagara  and,  on  the 
whole,  approve  of  the  place. 

Not  altogether:  the  episode  of  Isabel  and  the 
bridge  from  the  island  is  one  of  the  scenes  of  lively 
humor  and  super-feminine  insight  that  has  helped 
to  preserve  Mr.  Howells  and  his  stories  to  us  through 
all  the  changes  and  chances,  the  weariness  and  de 
pressions,  of  this  mortal  life.  His  two  married 
lovers  are  still  young  enough  to  feel  the  effect  of 
moonlight  on  the  rapids  and  above  the  falls.  "  The 
moon  ...  is  of  lucent  honey  there  from  the  first  of 
June  to  the  last  of  October  ...  I  think  with  tender 
ness  of  all  the  lives  that  have  opened  so  fairly  there ; 
the  hopes  that  have  reigned  in  the  glad  young 
hearts;  the  measureless  tide  of  joy  that  ebbs  and 
flows  with  the  arriving  and  departing  trains.  Else 
where  there  are  carking  cares  of  business  and  of 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  113 

fashion,  there  are  age  and  sorrow  and  heart-break; 
but  here  truly  youth,  feasts,  rapture,  I  kiss  my  hand 
to  Niagara  and  for  that  reason  I  would  I  were  a 
poet  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour." 

Mr.  Howells  has  become  a  poet  at  considerably 
greater  length  in  Stops  of  Various  Quills,  but  not 
as  he  has .  here.  He  takes  his  travelers  to  Quebec 
before  they  turn  towards  home.  On  the  way  they 
have  a  brief  encounter.  "  Why  did  you  let  that  old 
wretch  bore  you  and  then  pay  him  for  it?  .  .  .  Oh,  it 
reminded  me  so  sweetly  of  the  swindles  of  other 
lands  and  days,  that  I  couldn't  help  it  ...  and 
straightway  to  the  eyes  of  both  that  poor,  whiskey- 
fied  Irish  tatterdemalion  stood  transfigured  to  the 
glorious  likeness  of  an  Italian  beggar." 

At  Quebec  they  visit  a  convent  of  the  gray  nuns. 
"  But  indeed  since  there  must  be  Gray  Nuns,  is  it  not 
well  that  there  are  sentimentalists  to  take  a  mourn 
ful  pleasure  in  their  real  pallid  existence?  It 
seemed  to  him  that  the  two  prettiest  girls  might  well 
be  the  twain  that  he  had  seen  there  so  many  years 
ago,  .  .  .  would  it  be  too  cruel  if  they  were  really 
the  same  persons?  Or  would  it  be  yet  more  cruel  if 
every  year  two  girls  so  young  and  fair  were  self- 
damned  to  renew  the  likeness  of  that  youthful 
death?" 

Basil  March  and  his  wife  arrive  safely  in  Boston 
at  last,  for  all  their  forebodings,  and  very  glad  they 
are  to  get  there  again.  And  on  the  whole  this  is  a 
book  that  it  is  very  good  for  most  of  us,  not  Bos- 
tonians,  to  read  at  least  once  in  our  life.  In  it,  as  in 
Their  Silver  Wedding  Journey,  The  Kentons,  An 
nie  Kttburn,  The  Quality  of  Mercy,  The  Coast  of 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Bohemia,  Ragged  Lady,  The  Landlord  at  Lion's 
Head,  The  Story  of  a  Play,  and  the  distinctively  Al- 
trurian  series,  we  learn  to  love  Mr.  Howells  still  for 
all  his  faults  ;  but  we  do  not  (unless  we  are  very  young 
and  confiding,  or  old  and  limited  in  our  range  of 
thought  and  experience)  learn  to  trust  and  follow 
him  as  an  accurate  and  impartial  critic  of  life,  a 
prophet  of  democracy  and  of  America,  who  proves 
his  faith  by  his  works. 

He  begins  to  disprove,  in  spite  of  himself,  that  faith 
which  Tolstoi  inoculated  and  New  York  inforced  in 
A  Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  and  in  The  World 
of  Chance  —  two  books  dealing  with  journalistic  and 
literary  life  in  various  social  and  economic  relations, 
as  he  found  it  in  the  metropolis  shortly  after  his  re 
moval  from  Boston. 

Professor  Peck  stands  the  typical  Bostonian  on 
Broadway  (as  Mr.  Howells  stood  Basil  and  Isabel 
March  before  Grace  Church)  and  suggests  that  he 
"  resembles  a  small  mouse  that  has  crept  timidly  out 
into  a  vast  hall,  and  then,  appalled  by  the  unwonted 
vista,  scuds  back  to  its  hole  with  squeaks  of  genuine 
dismay."  He  also  says  in  A  Hazard  of  New  For 
tunes  and  The  World  of  Chance  — "  He  has  be 
come  melancholy,  and  with  the  true  New  England 
sense  of  duty  he  has  begun  to  feel  that  he  has  a 
'  mission.'  Who  can  recall  anything  of  the  two 
books  just  named,  except  squalor,  and  unhappiness, 
and  cheap  eating  houses,  and  commonplace  charac 
ters  of  all  grades  of  fatuity,  and  a  general  feeling 
that  the  author  evidently  thinks  the  times  are  out 
of  joint?" 

This  may  be  unduly  severe,  but  the  general  im- 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  115 

pression  produced  by  these  books  and  others  of  the 
later  Tolstoi-New  York  period,  remains  in  effect  what 
Professor  Peck  suggests.  There  is  very  little  in  the 
whole  New  England  scheme  of  obligation  that  has  to 
do  with  the  duty  of  helping  to  make  others  happy 
by  being  happy  one's  self.  There  is  very  little  that 
helps  to  this  end  in  the  dreary  futility  of  life  in  New 
York  as  Mr.  Howells  chooses  to  represent  it.  If  he 
had  shown  us  any  masterly  handling  in  his  tentative 
analyses  of  social  discontent  there;  much  more  if  he 
had  shown  us  a  single  practical  remedy  for  what  he 
considers  the  world  of  chance  in  literature,  or  the 
hazards  of  journalist  or  commercial  life,  not  in  direct 
alliance  with  "  the  system  " ;  if  he  had  shown  us  one 
single  practicable  point  of  attack  on  the  tyranny  of 
the  machine;  or  if,  having  determined  to  represent 
life  in  New  York  to-day  as  a  tragedy,  he  had  made 
it  an  inspiringly  and  unsparingly  noble  one,  we 
might  easier  have  forgiven  him  this  negative  absence 
of  joy  and  the  urge  to  joy. 

But  when  he  dips  his  pen  in  the  very  gall  and  bit 
terness  of  hopeless  pessimism ;  when  he  poetizes  it ; 
when  he  makes  the  philosophy  (such  as  there  is)  of 
Stops  of  Various  Quills  a  direct  negation  of  all 
joy  in  life,  all  the  will  to  live,  of  all  reason  for  liv 
ing  and  believing  in  life  itself;  when  he  tries  to  rub 
in  the  idea  that  all  pleasure  in  America  to-day,  harm 
less  or  otherwise,  rests  on  a  quivering  foundation  of 
communal  murder,  of  suffering,  of  madness,  of  dis 
ease  and  shame,  then  we  are  led  to  believe  that  either 
he  is  allowing  himself  indefensible  poetic  license,  or 
else  to  fear  that  the  ancestral  New  England  con 
science  has  become  ingrowing  to  the  extent  of  torture 


116     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

too  great  for  human  endurance  and  mortal  sanity. 

Certainly  we  see  no  good  reason  to  torture  our 
selves  by  reading  or  re-reading  his  darkest  pages. 
We  rebel,  and  he  rebels  too,  at  times.  The  same 
mind  that  could  produce  the  characteristic  American 
humor  of  The  Sleeping  Car,  The  Elevator,  The  Mouse 
Trap  and  other  farces  acted  by  our  fathers  and 
mothers  in  their  private  theatricals,  achieved  The 
Kentons  like  a  benediction  of  his  old  age. 

And  here  we  have  an  Indian  Summer  of  his  own 
by  the  same  hand  that  many  years  before  wrote  — 
"  She  was  herself,  in  that  moment  of  life  when,  to 
the  middle-aged  observer  at  least,  a  woman's  looks 
have  a  charm  which  is  wanting  to  her  earlier  bloom. 
By  that  time  her  character  has  wrought  itself  out 
more  clearly  in  her  face,  and  her  heart  and  mind  con 
front  you  more  directly  there.  It  is  the  youth  of 
the  spirit  which  has  come  to  the  surface." 

Obviously  a  man  who  writes  with  such  felicity  was 
born  to  be  happy  himself  and  to  make  others  so  by 
his  writings.  In  those  days  he  could  tell  us  "  It  will 
come  out  all  right  sometime.  You  preach  the  true 
American  gospel.  .  .  .  Of  course  there  is  no  other 
gospel.  That  is  the  gospel  .  .  .  men  fail,  but  man 
succeeds.  I  don't  know  what  it  all  means  or  any  part 
of  it." 

In  Annie  Kilburn  and  the  Altruria  books  he 
seems  to  think  that  it  never  can  or  will  come  out  all 
right  in  this  world.  A  Traveller  from  Altruria, 
which  is  a  fabulous  region  in  the  Atlantic  somewhere 
between  America  and  Europe,  comes  to  New  England 
to  make  a  social  survey  of  American  social  and  eco 
nomic  inequalities,  from  a  land  of  pure  reason  and 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  117 

brotherly  love  which  has  evolved  beyond  all  capitalistic! 
and  capital  fostered  distinctions,  and  he  finds  our 
social  inconsistencies  at  once  mystifying  and  abomin 
able. 

He  begins  at  the  railroad  station  in  Boston  by  in 
sisting  on  handling  his  own  trunk  and  helping  the 
porter  with  the  others.  He  pursued  the  same  tactics 
toward  waiters,  waitresses  and  other  servants.  He 
tells  us  that  in  Altruria  no  one  would  think  of  tak 
ing  any  exercise  of  the  sort  that  we  indulge  in  here 
for  various  reasons,  and  that  they  regard  there  as 
viciously  artificial,  while  others  lay  sick  and  help 
less  or  starved  in  misery ;  to  be  saved,  in  one  way  or 
another,  by  the  manual  labor  which  he  seems  to  re 
gard  as  the  prime  requisite  of  salvation  both  to  the 
individual  and  the  community  at  large. 

Doubtless  this  view  of  the  case  has  much  to  com 
mend  it  from  more  points  than  one. 

At  the  same  time  we  are  given  to  understand  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  starvation  or  helplessness 
from  the  physical  point  of  view  in  Altruria.  Mental 
and  moral  suffering  have  also  evidently  been  scaled 
down  there  to  an  irreducible  minimum.  Just  how, 
why,  where  and  when  irreducible  or  the  contrary,  we 
are  not  told  in  detail.  To  expect  a  stranger  from 
Altruria  to  prescribe  adequately  for  a  sane  New 
Yorker's  athletic  diet  seems  to  us  something  like  ex 
pecting  a  chronic  vegetarian  to  regulate  a  confirmed 
meat-eater's  cuisine  solely  in  the  light  of  his  own  ex 
perience. 

We  may  go  as  far  as  most  with  Mr.  Howells's  the 
ory  of  what  society  owes  to  the  individual,  the  child 
at  least,  in  one  way  or  another.  But  when  it  comes 


118     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

to  a  communal  simplification  and  regulation  of  tastes, 
we  are  inclined  to  inquire  of  Mr.  Howells  what  he 
knows  about  modern  athletics  from  direct  personal 
experience.  We  should  like  to  ask  him  if  he  ever 
emerged  triumphantly  from  a  hard-fought  champion 
ship  foot-ball  game,  or  a  lively  bout  of  high  class 
scientific  boxing  or  wrestling,  or  a  rattling  run  across 
country  in  something  close  to  record  time,  and  found 
occasion  to  think  himself  seriously  the  worse  for  the 
exercise  of  such  qualities  of  mental  and  physical 
strength  and  alertness,  of  grit,  of  comradeship,  of 
team  play,  of  chivalry  and  endurance,  as  go  to  the 
making  of  our  best  type  of  athletes  —  simply  because 
there  happened  to  be  a  good  many  other  people  in 
the  world  who  could  not  or  would  not  avail  them 
selves  of  such  facilities  for  individual  and  racial  fit 
ness. 

We  should  like  to  ask  our  A.ltrurian  if  a  man's  (or 
a  woman's)  first  duty  to  himself  and  everyone  else, 
in  this  best  of  all  possible  worlds,  such  as  it  is,  is 
not  to  make  and  to  keep  himself  as  fit  (in  the  highest 
and  widest  modern  acceptation  of  the  term)  for  work 
and  for  play  as  he  can,  and  to  get  as  much  joy  out 
of  work  and  play  both  as  the  exigencies  of  his  en 
vironment  will  permit.  We  should  like  to  inquire 
whether,  while  there  is  no  accounting  for  tastes,  if  we 
choose  to  take  our  pleasure  hilariously  in  cold  baths 
at  morning  (while  for  all  we  know  he  bathes  more 
sadly  in  hot  ones  at  night),  either  or  both  of  us  ought 
to  feel  ourselves  seriously  discommoded  at  the  time 
by  the  reflection  that  there  aren't  yet  enough  por 
celain  bath  tubs  or  out-door  bathing  places  to  go 
round  ? 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  119 

Finally,  we  should  like  to  suggest  that  athletics 
may  be  regarded,  from  one  point  of  view  at  least,  as 
a  safety  valve  for  the  normal  individual  capable  (or 
indisposed)  of  winning  his  own  way  in  the  world  and 
earning  a  living  or  a  surplus ;  and  that  in  New  York 
to-day,  wood-splitting,  ditch-digging,  doctoring, 
nursing,  sick-bed  watching,  district  visiting  —  in 
spite  of  present  deficiencies  —  had  better,  on  the 
whole,  continue  to  be  left  in  the  hands  of  specialized 
talent  than  turned  over  indiscriminately  to  the  the 
ories  of  well-meaning  and  incompetent  amateurs. 

However,  Mr.  Howells  has  no  use  whatever  for 
New  York  and  the  rest  of  our  big  cities  as  he  sees 
or  thinks  he  sees  them  to-day.  He  evidently  wants 
them,  as  Mr.  Bellamy  did,  abolished  mstanter  and  in 
toto,  or  preserved  in  part,  as  national  chambers  of 
horrors  and  relics  of  the  darkest  age  of  our  most 
modern  barbarism,  which,  in  some  miraculous  manner 
not  vouchsafed  to  us  by  him,  we  are  to  outgrow  and 
shed  completely  as  a  child  outgrows  and  sheds  a  suit 
of  its  father's  made  over  clothes. 

Just  with  what  we  are  to  cover  or  constrain  the 
nakedness  of  elemental  passion  and  inert  brutality 
when  the  conventions  and  safety  appliances  of  our 
present  system  have  been  simplified  out  of  existence 
is  not  apparent.  His  Altrurian  traveler  arrives  in 
Boston  via  Great  Britain.  Naturally  he  objects  to 
English  society  as  it  exists  to-day.  He  says : 

"  It  seemed  to  me  iniquitous,  for  we  believe  that 
inequality  and  iniquity  are  the  same  in  the  last  an-1 
alysis.  ...  I  see  that  my  word  voluntary  has  misled' 
you.  .  .  .  The  divisions  among  us  (Americans)  are 
rather  a  process  of  natural  selection.  ...  I  say 


120     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

simply  that  you  are  no  more  likely  to  meet  a  work 
ing  man  in  American  society  than  you  are  likely  to 
meet  a  colored  man.  .  .  .  The  American  ideal  is  not 
...  to  change  the  conditions  for  all,  but  for  each 
to  rise  above  the  rest  if  he  can." 

He  says  that  we  are  no  longer  a  Christian  nation, 
and  he  evidently  lays  the  foundations  of  his  Utopia 
on  the  Beatitudes  and  Christ's  reduction  of  the  ten 
commandments  to  two. 

Without  meeting  Mr.  Howells  directly  on  dog 
matic  grounds,  we  should  like  to  ask  Mr.  Howells 
what  he  thinks  Christianity  in  America  to-day  means 
to  him  and  those  who  sympathize  with  him  —  or 
think  they  do.  Mr.  Howells  does  not  call  himself 
a  Socialist  outright.  He  does  not  say  the  eighth 
commandment  is  both  iniquitous  and  obsolete  because 
it  forbids  theft,  whether  by  confiscation  and  process 
of  law  or  not.  He  does  not  say,  as  many  say  the 
New  Testament  says,  that  all  property,  like  all  in 
heritances  of  special  talents,  special  opportunities, 
special  inequalities  and  interests,  is  a  trust  (in  the 
older  sense  of  the  word)  and  a  stewardship,  or  ought 
to  be. 

He  does  not  say  outright  that  the  tenth  command 
ment  must  be  done  away  with  because  it  affirms 
property  and  social  distinctions,  because  it  tells  us 
not  to  covet  our  neighbor's  house  (his  whole  heredi 
tary  environment  and  opportunity),  his  wife  (and  her 
social  environment  and  obligations),  his  servants,  his 
cattle  and  the  rest  of  his  goods  and  chattels. 

We  may  think,  many  of  us,  that  this  patriarchal 
view  of  hereditary  and  social  grades  and  of  domestic 
service,  is  about  as  cumbersome  and  obsolete,  in  deal- 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS 

ing  with  many  of  our  social  and  economic  problems 
in  New  York  to-day,  as  an  establishment  of  the  pa 
triarchs  in  Westchester  County  or  in  the  middle  of 
Brooklyn  would  be.  At  the  same  time,  neither  the 
Altrurians  nor  anyone  else  have  proved  to  us  beyond 
peradventure  and  dispute  that  the  law  of  Moses  and 
of  Sinai  does  not  contain  in  itself  the  fundamental 
essentials  of  all  such  civilization  as  the  world  has  yet 
evolved. 

Christianity  comes  as  an  afterthought.  It  tells 
us  "  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself."  It 
does  not  say  "  Thou  shalt  love  him  as  you  have  per 
suaded  yourself  (not  him)  that  he  might  like  to 
have  you  love  him  —  in  an  impossible  state  of  non- 
inequality  of  mind,  body,  and  spirit,  absolutely  re 
moved  from  the  sound  racial  common  sense  which 
conducts,  successfully  and  progressively  on  the 
whole,  the  inevitable  compromises  of  life." 

If  I  happen  to  have  acquired,  by  heredity  or 
achievement,  certain  possessions,  certain  facilities, 
certain  opportunities  of  wealth,  education,  talent, 
culture,  I  may,  if  I  be  the  one  exceptional  man  or 
woman  in  ten  thousand  that  proves  the  rule,  achieve 
successful  and  efficient  martyrdom  as  Father  Damien 
did ;  or  I  may  prove  a  fanatic  prophet  of  discontent 
like  Tolstoi  in  an  environment  where  that  special 
brand  of  discontent  is  emphatically  and  immediately 
called  for. 

But  if  I  am  that  exception,  according  to  our  more 
searching  modern  standards,  I  must  be  no  half-way 
or  half-hearted  martyr;  I  must  be  a  successful  one, 
either  as  a  medical  missionary  whose  loss  will  be  felt, 
or  member  of  a  mission  that  supports  itself;  or  if 


122     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

I  am  a  prophet,  my  works  must  advertise  my  faith 
efficiently :  if  I  make  shoes,  my  shoes  must  prove  their 
fitness  to  compete  in  the  open  market  with  their  clos 
est  competitors,  hand-made  or  machine-made. 

This,  many  of  Mr.  Howells's  later  books  have  failed 
to  do;  and  on  the  whole  they  have  helped  consider 
ably  less  to  level  America  up  instead  of  down,  than 
they  might  have  done  if  he  had  laid  more  stress  on 
art  and  on  accurate  interpretation  of  the  world  as  it 
is  to-day,  and  less  on  doctrinal  fanaticism. 

Science,  Mr.  Phillips  tells  us,  is  leveling  the  world 
up,  and  science  has  its  martyrs  and  fanatics  too ;  but 
the  notes  that  these  men  take  when  they  condemn 
themselves  to  lingering  extinction  with  all  their  fac 
ulties  at  their  command  to  the  last,  knowing  per 
fectly  the  chances  they  take,  and  exactly  what  they 
aim  at,  add  to  the  sum  of  human  science  and  sanita 
tion  and  are  not  wasted. 

Mr.  Howells  hates  science,  or  shuts  his  eyes  to  it, 
because  it  affirms  and  demonstrates  beyond  cavil  the 
essential  inequalities  in  human,  animal  and  inorganic 
growth,  as  well  as  the  evolution  and  survival  of  the 
spiritually  and  physically  fit  that  result  therefrom. 

It  affirms,  far  more  liberally  than  he  does,  that 
physical  unfitness,  whether  caused  by  poverty,  by 
heredity  or  accident  or  temporary  self-abuse  and  neg 
lect,  may  ultimately  be  a  source  of  spiritual  fitness 
in  the  individual  or  the  community.  It  neither  con 
dones  nor  blames  such  unfitness,  or  any  other  sort, 
over-much.  It  goes  steadily  about  its  business !  it 
works  with  its  head,  and  with  its  hands  too,  as  neither 
Mr.  Howells  nor  Count  Tolstoi,  nor  any  day  laborer 
ever  worked  in  his  life,  slowly  eliminating  the  unfit  of 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  123 

all  sorts  and  degrees  and  conditions  that  make  for 
waste  in  the  mass  or  in  the  unit. 

It  shows  us,  as  Mr.  Howells  and  his  school  fail 
to  show  us,  as  the  world  in  general  failed  to  see  till 
very  recently,  that  there  is  justice  in  human  rela 
tions,  in  the  present  conflict  between  labor  and  cap 
ital  and  the  ultimate  consumer  in  America  to-day, 
if  you  strike  the  average  large  enough:  for  the  fu 
ture,  if  not  for  us ;  in  sociology  as  well  as  natural 
science ;  in  surgery  and  sanitation,  as  well  as  in  that 
branch  of  psychology  specialized  as  Christian  ethics, 
theoretical  or  applied. 

It  shows  us,  as  no  book  of  Mr.  Howells  or  his 
school  of  denatured  realism  has  ever  done,  that  un- 
fitness  and  inequality  not  only  form  the  material  and 
ground-work  of  the  life  that  we  live  and  interpret 
to-day,  but  that  they  also  furnish,  directly  or  indi 
rectly,  its  most  complex  and  fascinating  problems,  its 
greatest  inspirations  and  heroisms,  its  most  solid  and 
substantial  gains. 

Riches,  like  the  love  of  women  and  the  friendships 
of  youth,  may  take  to  themselves  wings  and  vanish; 
art  in  its  ultimate  stages,  however  loved,  prized  and 
acclaimed  at  its  inception,  may  prove  as  much  of  a 
failure  in  the  world's  eyes  as  a  son  that  goes  wrong; 
but  so  long  as  a  man  keeps  his  sanity  and  self-re 
spect,  once  he  has  proved  his  essential  inequality,  his 
superiority  in  service  to  the  masses  of  his  time  by  ad 
ding  to  the  stock  of  the  world's  useful  knowledge  and 
efficient  inspiration,  remains  one  to  be  envied  by  the 
majority  of  his  fellow  men.  And  the  world  is  taking 
such  inspiration  to  itself  eagerly  to-day.  It  is 
advertising  it  broadcast  through  the  medium  of  jour- 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

nalism  of  the  newspapers  and  the  magazines  of  the 
people. 

Inspiration  such  as  this  —  of  the  democracy  and 
the  science  that  achieves,  that  makes  good,  that  comes 
to  stay  —  sooner  or  later  is  going  to  sound  the  key 
note  of  our  greatest  and  most  distinctively  American 
fiction  and  poetry  of  the  future. 

In  the  meantime,  though  science,  per  se,  no  more 
than  art,  per  se,  is  regarded  as  an  open  sesame  to  the 
retreats  of  our  social  forty  thieves  and  four  hun 
dreds  of  high  finance,  Mr.  Howells  is  about  as  far 
wrong  when  he  says  that  a  working  man  is  as  rare 
a  sight  in  American  society  as  a  negro  is,  as  when 
he  says  that  the  American  ideal  is  not  to  change  the 
conditions  for  all  —  where  we  are  convinced  that  they 
need  to  be  changed. 

The  surgeon  works,  the  educator  works,  the  jour 
nalist  and  the  social  surveyor  works,  the  millionaire 
and  the  multi-millionaire  works,  the  master  builder  of 
the  transcontinental  railroad  system  works,  quite  as 
hard  and  generally  quite  as  honestly,  mutatis 
mutandis,  as  the  walking  delegate  or  labor  grafter 
higher  up  or  lower  down  that  he  has  to  dicker  with, 
or  the  literary  man  that  consciously  or  unconsciously 
misrepresents  him.  The  idle  rich  are  not  gaining 
prestige,  save  in  the  minds  of  silly  women  and  para 
site  trades-people.  On  the  contrary,  they  are  pass 
ing,  slowly  but  inevitably.  The  American  leisure 
class  continues  to  be  confined  to  women,  children,  col 
lege  boys,  critics,  degenerates,  incompetents,  hoboes 
and  the  unemployed. 

And  the  men  who  do  work,  whether  with  their 
hands  or  their  heads  or  both ;  the  men  who  do  things 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS 

and  who  help  others  to  do  them,  whether  they  are  in 
terested  directly  or  the  contrary  in  New  Nationalism, 
Insurgency,  child  welfare,  factory  and  tenement 
legislation  and  sanitation,  municipal  ownership,  social 
surveys  and  settlements,  education  that  really  edu 
cates,  and  art  and  literature  that  really  inspire  and 
interpret,  are  all  helping  in  one  way  or  another  to 
organize  and  re-organize  the  whole  movement  of  our 
national  life,  to  level  up  —  not  down. 

Meanwhile  —  if  we  can  find  the  opportunity  for 
it  —  there  is  much  that  is  shrewd,  much  that  is  sug 
gestive,  much  that  is  noble  and  inspiring,  within  its 
limitations,  in  the  Altruria  series  and  others  of  Mr. 
Howells's  books  that  are  conceived  in  the  same  spirit. 
The  literary  sociologist  and  the  contemporary  his 
torian  of  manners  cannot  afford  to  pass  him  over  to 
day  or  to-morrow.  Types  like  Annie  Kilburn  her 
self,  Lawyer  Putney,  and  the  chief  merchant  and 
church  autocrat  of  the  little  New  England  town 
where  Annie's  story  is  laid,  are  as  ineradicable  and 
racy  of  the  soil  as  the  New  England  conscience  itself 
in  its  more  pronounced  moods  and  manifestations. 

Putney  gives  us  the  whole  man  at  a  stroke,  and 
much  of  the  speaker  as  well,  when  he  says :  "  Well, 
Brother  Gerrish  has  got  a  good  many  ideals.  He 
likes  to  get  anybody  he  can  by  the  throat  and  squeeze 
the  difference  of  opinion  out  of  him."  Somewhat 
modified,  we  have  here  an  unconscious  suggestion  of 
Mr.  Howells  himself.  Equally  graphic  are :  "  I 
presume  the  Almighty  knows  what  He  is  about;  but 
sometimes  He  appears  to  save  at  the  spigot  and 
waste  at  the  bung-hole  like  the  rest  of  us.  He  let 
me  cripple  my  boy  to  reform  me  " ;  and  the  whole 


126     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

delineation  of  the  village  drunkard's  character  and 
the  part  that  he  plays  in  Annie's  tragedy  of  misdi 
rected  and  well  meant  futility. 

There  are  occasional  croppings  out  of  the  same 
vein  of  close  and  not  unkindly  observation  and  ap 
praisal  of  character  and  social  tendencies  in  the  Al- 
trurian  himself,  in  The  Hazard  of » N<ew  Fortunes, 
The  Coast  of  Bohemia,  A  Woman's  Reason,  and  other 
books  of  both  periods. 

"  The  time  has  passed  when  a  lady  could  look  after 
the  dinner  and  perhaps  cook  part  of  it  herself,  and 
then  rush  in  to  receive  her  guests  and  do  the 
amenities.  .  .  .  The  nicest  kind  of  a  fad  is  charity. 
...  I  sometimes  think  they  use  it  to  work  up  with. 
And  there  are  some  who  use  religion  the  same 
way.  .  .  . 

"  By  American  of  course  I  mean  a  town  where  at 
least  one-third  of  the  people  are  raw  foreigners  or 
rawly  extracted  natives.  .  .  .  Think  of  a  baby  in  a 
flat !  It's  a  contradiction  in  terms ;  the  flat  is  the 
negation  of  motherhood. —  It's  made  to  give  arti 
ficial  people  a  society  basis  on  a  little  money  —  too 
much  money  of  course  for  what  they  get.  So  the 
cost  of  the  building  is  put  into  the  marble  halls  and 
idiotic  decorations.  .  .  .  None  of  these  flats  have 
a  living  room.  What  house  in  New  York  has?  No, 
the  Anglo-Saxon  as  we  know  it  in  the  Anglo-Saxon 
home  is  simply  impossible  in  the  Franco-American 
flat,  not  because  it's  humble,  but  because  it's 
false.  .  .  . 

66  Mrs.  March  was  one  of  those  wives  who  exact 
a  more  rigid  adherence  to  their  ideals  from  their 
husbands  than  from  themselves.  Early  in  their  mar- 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HO  WELLS  127 

ried  life  she  had  taken  charge  of  him  in  all  matters 
that  she  considered  practical.  She  did  not  include 
the  business  of  bread-winning  in  these.  .  .  . 

"  Other  men  said  these  many  millioned  millionaires 
were  smart  and  got  their  money  by  sharp  practice 
to  which  lesser  men  could  not  attain,  but  Dryfoos 
believed  that  he  could  compass  the  same  ends,  by  the 
same  means,  with  the  same  chances ;  he  respected 
their  money,  not  them  .  .  .  and  though  Dryfoos's 
soul  bowed  itself  and  crawled,  it  was  with  a  gambler's 
admiration  of  their  wonderful  luck.  ...  If  it  was 
not  distinctive,  it  was  not  for  want  of  distinguished 
people,  but  because  there  seems  to  be  some  solvent 
about  New  York  that  reduces  all  men  to  its  potent 
level,  that  touches  everybody  with  its  potent  magic, 
and  brings  to  the  surface  the  deeply  underlying  no 
body." 

In  other  words,  it's  harder  to  be,  and  to  appear,  a 
big  frog  in  a  big  puddle  than  in  a  smaller  one.  Mr. 
Howells  felt  this  and  suffered.  He  saw  other  men 
and  women  of  his  own  type  feeling  this  and  suffering 
from  it.  And  this,  plus  the  more  obvious  social  and 
financial  inequality  and  iniquity  that  flaunts  itself 
on  the  streets,  added  to  the  narrowness  of  his  own 
intellectual  and  professional  circle,  and  to  the  ques 
tionable  social  philosophy  of  a  Russian  novelist  and 
reformer,  caused  him  to  rush  into  print  and  to  revert 
to  a  pessimism  that  the  world  on  the  whole  takes  little 
heed  of,  and  has  less  use  for. 

This  is  not  the  kind  of  thing  for  which  we  are  most 
grateful  to  Mr.  Howells  or  the  soil  that  produced 
him.  In  his  case  we  prefer  to  remember  touches 
like  "  her  father  pressed  her  cheek  closer  against  his, 


128     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  she  felt  the  smile  that  she  could  not  see  in  the 
dark,"  and  "  But  when  he  wakes  in  the  night  he  likes 
to  reach  out  and  touch  his  father's  hand.  The  child 
looked  mortified.  4  I  wish  I  could  reach  out  and 
touch  my  father's  hand,'  said  Annie.  The  cloud  left 
the  boy's  face.  '  I  can't  remember  whether  I  said  my 
prayers,  mother.  I've  been  thinking  so ! '  '  Well 
say  them  over  again  to  me  '  " ;  and  the  charm  of  the 
earlier  books  which  is  evanescent  and  intangible  in  its 
first  effect,  like  all  charm,  like  all  youth,  and  yet 
capable  of  infinite  renewal  by  the  world  where  the 
author  sees  so  little  joy  to-day,  when  the  world  finds 
time  to  turn  the  pages  back,  or  to  start  its  own  new 
life  stories. 

More  credit  than  is  immediately  apparent,  must 
be  given  Mr.  Howells  in  his  effort  to  turn  and  start 
a  new  page  in  the  world's  history.  The  evil  that  he 
has  done,  the  false  estimate  of  reaction  that  he  has 
tried  to  deify,  like  his  misapprehension  of  what  Amer 
ica  means  and  is  going  to  mean,  may  be  held  incon 
siderable  in  the  long  run.  It  will  be  buried  in  his 
grave  or  before;  the  good  that  he  has  done,  that  ir 
radiates  his  writings  like  his  life,  will  live  after  him. 
In  so  far  as  he  has  preached  (as  he  has  practiced) 
that  simplicity,  naturalness  and  beauty  are  bed-rock 
characteristics  in  American  literature  and  life,  which 
none  of  us  can  long  afford  to  lose  sight  of;  in  so  far 
as  he  has  made  war  on  injustice,  or  pretentiousness 
and  deceit;  in  so  far  as  he  has  charmed  us  and  opened 
our  minds  and  our  hearts,  we  owe  him  a  debt  that  we 
shall  not  lightly  pay.  And  we  shall  continue  to  be 
indebted  to  him  as  long  as  his  books  are  read,  as  many 
must  be,  by  our  children  and  theirs  after  them. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  129 

In  so  far  as  he  has  fallen  short  of  a  just  estimate 
and  an  adequate  portrayal  of  the  problems  that  con 
front  us  here  to-day,  our  regret  is  for  him  and  the 
men  and  women  of  his  generation,  rather  than  for 
our  own.  For  just  so  far  as  he  and  men  like  Mark 
Twain,  like  Whitman,  like  Lanier,  like  Lowell  and 
the  rest  of  the  New  England  school,  have  fallen  short, 
they  have  in  reality  raised  the  standard  higher  and 
left  us  the  more  to  do. 

Literary  men  of  to-day  may  or  may  not  out-rival 
or  equal  them:  time  and  posterity  will  settle  that. 
It  will  be  enough  if  we  understand  them  and  do  them 
justice,  if  we  criticise  and  interpret  them  construc 
tively. 

For  the  achievement  of  the  past  and  the  criticism 
of  the  present,  together,  make  the  promise  of  the 
future.  And  it  is  in  that  promise  and  prophecy, 
rather  than  in  any  retrospect  or  survey  of  present 
material  and  authorship,  that  the  American  literature 
which  shall  last,  based  on  a  wider  and  higher  inter 
pretation  of  our  national  character  and  destiny,  our 
national  wealth,  obligations  and  opportunities,  pre 
sents  its  most  alluring  and  inspiring  aspect. 


IV 

FRANK  NORRIS 

"Literature  is  of  all  arts  the  most  democratic.  It  is  of, 
by  and  for  the  people  in  a  fuller  measure  even  than  gov 
ernment  itself.  ...  It  is  the  people  who  after  all  make  a 
literature.  If  they  read  the  few,  the  illuminate,  will  write. 
But  first  must  come  the  demand,  .  .  .  from  the  people,  the 
Plain  People,  the  condemned  bourgeoisie.  The  select  circle 
of  the  e"lite,  the  *  studio '  hangers-on,  the  refined,  will  never, 
never,  clamor  they  never  so  loudly,  toil  they  never  so  pain 
fully,  produce  the  Great  Writer.  .  .  .  The  more  the  Plain 
People  read  they  will  discriminate.  It  is  inevitable,  and  by 
and  by  they  will  demand  something  better.  It  is  impossible 
to  read  a  book  without  formulating  an  opinion  about  it.  ... 
The  survival  of  the  fittest  is  as  good  in  the  evolution  of  a 
literature  as  of  our  bodies,  and  the  best  'academy'  for  the 
writers  of  the  United  States  is  after  all  the  judgment  of 
the  people  exercised  throughout  the  lapse  of  a  considerable 
time."  The  Responsibilities  of  the  Novelist,  1901.  ISalt  and 
Sincerity. 

THE  rise  of  The  Saturday  Evening  Post  is  a 
case  in  point.  So  with  the  rest  of  the  muck-rate 
magazines  and  the  new  school  of  virile  out-of-doors 
fiction  —  for  men  and  boys  first,  women  and  girls  in 
cidentally,  patriots  and  progressive  critics  of  Ameri 
can  literature  and  life,  first  last  and  all  the  time  — 
that  is  gradually  letting  light  into  our  dark  places. 

The  democracy  of  Frank  Norris  is  as  genuine  and 
uncompromising  as  that  of  Mark  Twain.  At  the 
same  time  it  is  more  progressive. 

It  was  not  for  nothing  that  Frank  Norris  was  born 
130 


FRANK  NORRIS  131 

in  Chicago.  It  was  not  for  nothing  that  his  family 
took  the  trail  westward  and  that  he  emigrated  to 
California  while  he  was  yet  in  his  teens.  It  was  not 
for  nothing  that  he  followed  still  farther  afield  the 
call  of  the  vanishing  frontier  which  he  has  himself  de 
limitated  in  one  of  the  strongest  and  most  suggestive 
essays  of  the  book  quoted  above;  that  he  saw  his 
share  of  the  world  —  the  white  man's  and  the  Anglo- 
Saxon's  share;  that  he  saw  it  steadily  and  saw  it 
whole ;  that  he  found  his  theory  of  life  in  the  open,  in 
the  wilds  and  in  the  great  grain  fields  of  a  continent, 
as  well  as  in  its  great  cities,  before  he  set  himself  to 
realize  it  on  paper,  and  to  interpret  America  to  it 
self  and  the  rest  of  the  world  as  no  other  twentieth 
century  writer  has  yet  begun  to  do. 

And  in  his  later  interpretation  of  life,  in  The 
Octopus  and  the  rest  of  the  unfinished  Trilogy  oft 
the  Wheat  it  is  the  voice  of  the  Plain  People,  of  the  \ 
American  business  men,  of  Big  Business  in  its 
broadest  and  highest  range,  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  ad 
venturer,  merchant,  trader,  farmer,  manufacturer, 
banker,  common  carrier,  seaman,  yeoman,  trailsman, 
statesman,  through  the  centuries,  that  strikes  the 
keynote  decisively,  successfully,  representatively  and 
with  increasing  power. 

One  does  not  have  to  read  The  Responsibilities 
of  the  Novelist  to  realize  that  Frank  Norris,  like 
the  best  and  biggest  of  the  men  and  women  he  repre 
sents,  is  for  the  Square  Deal  progressively  on  the 
broadest  possible  basis.  There  is  an  epic  breadth  of 
scope  and  power  of  purpose  in  The  Octopus  and 
The  Pit  that  reduces  life  to  its  prime  factors,  that 
transcends  national  and  racial  as  it  does  mere  in- 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

dividual  and  local  interests,  and  that  is  a  new  thing 
in  literature. 

And  in  the  earlier  work  as  well,  in  Blix,  in  Moran 
of  the  Lady  Letty,  in  McTeague,  in  A  Man's 
Woman,  there  is  an  elemental  insistence  on  the 
reality  of  Romance  in  the  modern  world,  on  its  im 
manence  in  the  workaday  lives  of  the  millions,  for  all 
who  have  eyes  to  see  it,  that  is  equally  characteristic 
of  the  man  and  of  his  origin. 

In  this  as  in  most  things  he  is  his  own  critic.  He 
writes  so  he  who  runs  may  read  and  be  moved  to 
come  and  read  again.  The  following  quotation  from 
his  last  book  of  critical  essays  states  in  set  terms 
what  his  whole  life  and  life  work  exemplifies : 

"  Lately  we  have  been  taking  Romance  a  weary 
journey  across  the  water.  .  .  .  Would  you  take  her 
across  the  street  to  your  neighbor's  front  parlor 
(with  the  bisque  fisher  boy  on  the  mantel  and  the 
photograph  of  Niagara  Falls  in  glass  hanging  in 
the  front  window)  would  you  introduce  her  there  .  .  . 
she  might  be  awkward  .  .  .  and  knock  over  the  lit 
tle  bisque  fisher  boy.  Well  she  might.  If  she  did 
you  might  find  under  the  base  of  the  statuette,  hid 
den  away,  tucked  away  —  what?  God  knows.  But 
something  that  would  be  a  complete  revelation  of  my 
neighbor's  secretest  life. 

"  So  you  think  Romance  would  stop  in  the  front 
parlor  and  discuss  medicated  flannels  and  mineral 
waters  with  the  ladies?  Not  for  more  than  five 
minutes.  She  would  be  off  upstairs.  .  .  .  She  would 
find  a  heart-ache  (maybe  between  the  pillows  of  the 
mistress'  bed)  and  a  memory  carefully  secreted  in 
the  master's  deed  box.  She  would  come  upon  a  great 


FRANK  NORRIS  133 

hope  amid  the  books  and  papers  of  the  study  table  in 
the  young  man's  room  and  perhaps  —  who  knows  — 
an  affair,  or,  Great  Heavens!  an  intrigue,  in  the 
scented  ribbons  and  gloves  and  hair-pins  of  the  young 
lady's  bureau  .  .  .  and  this  very  day  in  this  very 
hour  she  is  sitting  among  the  rags  and  wretchedness, 
the  dust  and  despair  of  the  tenements  of  the  East 
Side  of  New  York.  .  .  . 

"  You  will  not  follow  her  to  the  slums  for  you  be 
lieve  that  Romance  should  only  amuse  and  entertain 
you,  singing  sweet  songs  and  touching  the  harp  of  sil 
ver  strings  with  rosy  tipped  fingers.  If  haply  she 
should  call  to  you  from  the  squalor  of  a  dive  .  .  . 
crying,  '  Look !  Listen !  This  too  is  life.  These 
too  are  my  children !  Look  at  them,  know  them  and 
knowing  help  ! '  .  .  .  you  would  answer :  '  Come  from 
there,  Romance.  Your  place  is  not  there.'  And  you 
would  make  of  her  a  harlequin." 

And  again  he  says :  "  There  is  more  significance 
as  to  the  ultimate  excellence  of  American  letters  in 
the  sight  of  the  messenger  boy  devouring  his  Old 
Sleuth  and  Deadwood  Dick  and  Boy  Detectives  with 
an  earnest  serious  absorption,  than  in  the  spectacle  of 
a  *  reading  group  '  of  dilettanti  coquetting  with  Ver- 
laine  and  pretending  that  they  understand  him." 

And  again :  "  I  have  no  patience  with  the  theory 
of  literature  that  claims  that  the  Great  Man  be 
longs  only  to  the  cultured  few.  You  must  write,  so 
the  theorists  explain,  for  that  small  number  of  fine 
minds  who  because  of  education,  because  of  delicate, 
fastidious  taste,  are  competent  to  judge. 

"  I  tell  you  this  is  wrong.  It  is  precisely  the 
same  purblind  prejudice  that  condemned  the  intro- 


I 


134     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

duction  of  the  printing  press  because  it  would  cheapen 
and  vulgarize  the  literature  of  the  day.  A  literature 
that  cannot  be  vulgarized  is  no  literature  at  all  and 
will  perish  just  as  surely  as  rivers  run  to  the  sea. 
The  things  that  last  are  the  understandable  things 
.  .  .  understandable  to  the  common  minds,  the  Plain 
People." 

In  any  general  and  detailed  consideration  of  the 
literature  of  insurgency  —  insurgency  against  ma 
chine-made  conditions  and  tendencies  and  methods  of 
thought  and  action  —  practically  the  whole  of  The 
Responsibilities  of  the  Novelist  might  be  quoted. 
Next  to  The  Octopus,  The  Husband's  Story  and 
The  Reign  of  Gilt,  there  is  hardly  a  book  pub 
lished  in  America  during  the  last  ten  years,  that 
has  so  direct  and  inspiring  a  message  for  the  Plain 
People  of  America  of  all  sorts,  sexes,  classes,  present 
or  previous  conditions  of  servitude,  for  whom  Frank 
Norris  and  David  Graham  Phillips  wrote. 

Norris  had  the  training  of  a  newspaper  man  in  a 
generation  later  than  Mark  Twain's,  when  life  in 
this  country  had  evolved  itself  into  a  more  complicated 
machinery  of  existence  than  that  of  the  days  when 
the  older  man  crossed  the  continent  before  the  Civil 
War. 

Both  men  lived  in  San  Francisco  at  formative  pe 
riods  of  their  lives  and  literary  careers.  Both  felt, 
and  sooner  or  later  realized,  the  transcontinental 
energy,  the  primitive  democracy,  the  intense  and  un 
compromising  hatred  of  shams  and  conventional  tra 
dition,  that  still  characterize  in  many  ways  the  world's 
greatest  mining  camp  and  seaport.  Both  were  fitted 
by  temperament  and  by  training  to  see  life  as  it  is, 


FRANK  NORRIS  135 

here  and  to-day,  on  broad-gauge  lines,  and  to  concern 
themselves  with  the  most  direct  and  vital  view  of  it. 

Norris  was  the  better  trained  journalist,  largely 
because  journalism  in  America,  from  New  York  to 
San  Francisco,  has  specialized  itself  during  the  last 
fifty  years,  as  journalism  has  never  been  specialized 
before. 

During  the  same  period  journalism,  beneath  its 
superficial  sensationalism  and  vulgarity,  throughout 
the  Anglo-Saxon  world  has  managed  to  realize  its 
kinship  to  the  literature  that  lasts,  and  to  develop 
itself  accordingly.  The  work  of  Norris,  Phillips  and 
Kipling  alone  testify  sufficiently  to  this. 

Stress  has  been  laid  on  the  influence  of  Zola  on 
Norris's  method  and  cosmic  grasp  of  his  subject.  It 
is  highly  probable  that  if  Zola  had  never  existed, 
Norris  would  nevertheless  have  written  The  Octopus 
and  The  Pit  much  as  he  did  elect  to  write  them. 

The  influence  of  Kipling  and  of  Stevenson  in  wak 
ing  up  the  modern  world  to  the  fact  that  Romance 
is  alive,  here  and  to-day,  for  each  and  every  one  of 
us  who  has  eyes  to  see  it,  is  less  evident,  superficially, 
in  these  two  books.  Spiritually  and  intrinsically  it 
is  far  more  to  the  point. 

Point  of  view  and  method  both,  in  both  these 
books,  as  well  as  in  the  rest  of  their  author's  work, 
is  far  more  Anglo-Saxon  than  Latin.  More  than 
cither,  in  the  last  analysis,  it  remains  essentially  and 
triumphantly  American  and  democratic. 

Norris  worked  out  his  own  literary  salvation  and 
immortality  beginning  as  an  American  and  a  news 
paper  man.  This  is  evident  in  his  own  words,  also 
from  The  Responsibilities  of  the  Novelist. 


136     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  Hard  to  be  original  —  Great  Heavens !  when  a 
new  life  comes  into  the  world  for  every  tick  of  the 
watch  in  your  pocket  —  a  new  life  with  all  its  compli 
cations  and  with  all  the  thousand  and  one  other 
complications  it  sets  in  motion !  Hard  to  be  original ! 
when  of  all  those  billion  lives,  your  own  is  as  distinct, 
as  individual,  as  original  as  though  you  had  been 
born  out  of  season  in  the  Paleozoic  age  and  yours 
the  first  human  face  the  sun  ever  shone  upon. 

"  Go  out  into  the  street  and  stand  where  the  ways 
cross  and  hear  the  machinery  of  life  clashing  in  its 
grooves.  Can  the  utmost  resort  of  your  ingenuity 
evolve  a  better  story  than  any  one  of  the  million  that 
jog  your  elbow  .  .  .  turn  your  eyes  inward  upon 
yourself  down,  down  to  the  heart  of  you;  and  the 
tread  of  the  feet  upon  the  pavement  is  the  systole  and 
diastole  of  your  own  being  .  .  .  different  only  in 
degree.  It  is  life,  and  it  is  that  of  which  you  have  to 
make  your  book  —  your  novel  —  life,  not  other 
people's  novels.  Or  look  from  your  window  and  a 
whole  literature  goes  marching  by  clamoring  for 
leaders  and  a  master  hand  to  guide  it." 

Norris  failed  to  find  leaders  here  at  home,  and 
like  the  Americans  that  crossed  the  plains  to  the  Pa 
cific  and  the  pioneers  of  all  time,  he  made  himself 
one.  With  him  American  fiction  and  American  lit 
erature  definitely  crosses  the  great  plains  and  the 
Great  Divide  and  assumes  lasting  transcontinental 
proportions.  Bret  Harte  was  as  local  as  regional, 
as  provincial  in  his  point  of  view  as  was  Joaquin  Mil 
ler,  or  as  Sophie  Orne  Jewett  and  Mr.  Howells.  Not 
so  Norris. 

He  traveled,  he  prospected,  too  keenly,  too  widely, 


FRANK  NORRIS  137 

in  the  flesh  and  in  the  spirit,  before  he  reached  his 
full  power,  to  remain  as  those  others  remained,  rep 
resentative  of  a  section  or  a  sectional  point  of  view; 
and  the  story  of  his  genesis  and  his  evolution  is  as  in 
tensely  and  representatively  American  as  the  best  of 
his  completed  works. 

5/iiT,  first  published  as  a  serial  in  The  Puritan 
in  1899,  when  its  author  was  still  unknown  to  the 
American  reading  public  at  large,  is  not  only  a 
thoroughly  charming  idyl  of  modern  American  and 
Californian  life;  it  is  also  a  remarkably  interesting 
study  in  origins. 

It  begins  at  the  breakfast  table  of  Travis  Bessemer 
and  her  father,  near  the  top  of  the  Washington  Street 
Hill  in  San  Francisco.  Condy  Rivers,  associate  edi 
tor  of  the  San  Francisco  Daily  Times,  Sunday  sup 
plement,  drops  in  unexpectedly  for  tea  that  night ; 
unexpectedly,  because,  though  he  is  a  newspaper  man, 
he  is  at  the  same  time  a  promising  writer  of  short 
stories,  afflicted  with  a  temperament  of  the  absent- 
minded  brand,  and  he  has  seen  Travis  three  or  four 
times  already  during  the  week  just  passed,  like  every 
other  week  for  the  last  year  and  a  half. 

Condy  is  twenty-eight;  Travis  (later  christened 
Blix  by  him,  because  she  has  always  been  "  just  that 
—  bully  and  snappy  and  crisp  and  bright  and  sort 
of  sudden  ")  ten  years  younger.  Condy  has  been  a 
little  brother  of  the  rich  for  years ;  he  has  a  weak 
ness  for  poker  and  generally  loses  more  than  he 
wrins  on  the  rare  occasions  when  he  is  in  funds. 

Blix  is  about  to  come  out  socially  and  is  not  at  all 
eager  to  do  so.  They  have  flirted  mildly  for  some 
time.  On  this  particular  Sunday  evening  flirtation 


138     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

has  lost  its  savor.  They  begin  to  discover  that  they 
are  in  deadly  danger  of  boring  one  another. 

Blix  makes  up  her  mind  definitely  and  on  the  spot 
about  something  that  has  happened  recently.  She 
also  lets  Condy  know  about  it.  She  announces  that 
she  is  not  going  to  come  out.  "  It's  not  .  .  .  that 
I'm  afraid  of  Jack  Carter  and  his  dirty  stories ;  I 
simply  don't  want  to  know  the  kind  of  people  that 
have  made  Jack  Carter  possible  ...  as  for  having 
a  good  time  I'll  find  my  amusements  somewhere  else. 
.  .  .  And  whether  I  have  a  good  time  or  not,  I'll 
keep  my  own  self-respect  .  .  .  the  whole  thing  tires 
me  .  .  .  I'm  not  going  to  break  with  it  because  I  have 
any  '  purpose  in  life  '  or  that  sort  of  thing.  .  .  .  I'm 
going  to  be  sincere  and  not  pretend  to  like  people  and 
things  I  don't  like."  .  .  . 

As  an  initial  step  in  the  banishment  of  pretense 
they  stop  flirting,  and  find  that  they  are  beginning 
to  have  a  much  better  time  than  they  ever  had  be 
fore. 

Blix  interests  herself  in  Condy's  work.  She  sees 
things  the  way  he  sees  them,  and  they  both  see  them 
as  Kipling  does.  He  takes  her  to  the  docks  and 
aboard  ship  when  he  goes  to  write  his  Sunday 
specials,  and  he  writes  better  short  stories  than 
ever. 

They  discover  Chinatown,  they  go  fishing  in  the 
country,  they  take  long  walks  together.  Blix  learns 
to  play  poker  and  makes  Condy  promise  to  play  with 
her  and  no  one  else  when  he  feels  that  he  must  play. 

She  wins  all  his  money,  whenever  he  has  any  to 
spare,  till  his  appetite  for  the  game  wears  off.  They 
manufacture  a  romance  in  real  life  from  two  adver- 


FRANK  NORRIS  139 

tisements  in  the  personal  column  of  a  San  Francisco 
paper ;  they  personally  conduct  it  to  Luna's  Mexican 
restaurant  through  the  medium  of  the  mails ;  later 
they  see  it  come  true,  and  become  very  good  friends 
with  both  parties. 

One  of  them  has  been  boat  steerer  on  a  New  Bed 
ford  Whaler,  has  ridden  in  the  Strand  in  a  hansom 
with  William  Ewart  Gladstone,  has  acted  as  ice  pilot 
on  an  Arctic  relief  expedition,  has  fought  with  the 
Seris  on  the  lower  California  Islands,  and  sold 
champagne  made  from  rock  candy,  effervescent 
salts  and  Reisling  wine,  to  the  Coreans  —  among 
other  phases  of  a  checkered  and  adventurous  career. 

Out  of  these  experiences  Condy  pieces  together  the 
frame-work  of  his  first  novel.  This  leads  to  an  of 
fer  of  a  sub-editorship  by  the  Centennial  Company  of 
New  York  at  the  time  when  Blix  has  completed  prep 
arations  to  make  her  home  for  the  time  being  with 
an  aunt  of  hers  in  New  York,  and  to  study  medicine 
there. 

"  There  in  that  room,  high  above  the  city,  a  little 
climax  had  come  swiftly  to  a  head,  a  little  crisis  in 
two  lives  had  suddenly  developed.  The  moment  that 
had  been  in  preparation  for  the  last  few  months,  for 
the  last  few  years,  the  last  few  centuries,  behold  it 
had  arrived. 

"  '  Blix  do  you  love  me?  ' 

"  Suddenly  it  was  the  New  Year.  Somewhere 
close  at  hand  a  chorus  of  chiming  church  bells  sang 
together.  Far  off  in  the  direction  of  the  wharves 
where  the  great  steam-ships  lay,  came  the  glad, 
sonorous  shouting  of  a  whistle  .  .  .  from  point  to 
point,  from  street  to  roof  top  and  from  roof  to  spire, 


140     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  vague  murmur  of  many  sounds  grew  and  spread 
and  widened,  slowly,  grandly ;  that  profound  and 
steady  bourdon,  as  of  an  invisible  organ  swelling, 
deepening  and  expanding  to  the  full  male  diapason  of 
the  city  aroused  and  signaling  the  advent  of  another 
year.  .  .  . 

"  It  was  the  old  year  yet  when  Condy  asked  the 
question ;  in  that  moment's  pause  while  Blix  hesitated 
to  answer  him,  the  New  Year  had  come  .  .  .  only 
for  a  moment.  Then  she  came  closer  to  him  and  put 
a  hand  on  each  of  his  shoulders. 

"  '  Happy  New  Year,  dear,'  she  said." 

Here  is  democracy  in  excelsis,  and  some  initial  sug 
gestion  of  that  cosmic  breath  and  truth  of  imagery 
which,  in  The  Octopus,  has  never  yet  been  equaled  in 
fiction. 

In  Moran  of  the  Lady  Letty  the  influence  of 
Stevenson  is  more  noticeable ;  in  McTeague  and 
A  Man's  Woman,  that  of  Zola.  The  first  book 
starts,  as  Jack  London's  Sea  Wolf  does,  with  the 
adventures  of  a  San  Francisco  club  man,  a  weakling 
physically,  who  finds  himself  shanghaied  on  board  a 
Pacific  trading  schooner.  Moran  and  the  Lady 
Letty  come  into  the  tale  as  the  captain's  daughter  of 
a  Norwegian  timber  bark  that  lies  dismantled  in  mid- 
ocean.  Moran  is  emphatically  a  man's  woman.  She 
is  neither  beautiful  nor  romantic  in  the  conventional 
sense  of  the  two  words.  She  is  six  feet  high,  and 
broad  in  proportion,  with  a  mane  of  yellow  hair,  a 
personality  that  is  in  some  respects  suggestive  of 
a  young  Valkyrie,  and  a  keen  eye  for  the  main  chance. 

Her  father  dies  from  injuries  received  during  the 
storm  that  disabled  his  ship.  Thereafter  she  makes 


FRANK  NORRIS  141 

it  her  business  to  make  a  real  man  out  of  the  club 
man ;  and  after  various  adventures  with  a  crew  of 
Chinamen  and  other  hard  characters,  she  succeeds 
reasonably  well. 

The  book  does  not  conclude  with  the  conventional 
happy  ending  any  more  than  Stevenson's  Treasure 
Island  does.  It  is  considerably  shorter  than  The 
Wrecker,  which  may  have  inspired  it  in  part,  and 
may  be  compared  to  both  the  other  books  without 
disparagement  to  any  or  all  concerned. 

In  A  Man's  Woman,  1900,  like  The  Pit,  Nor- 
ris  scored  a  partial  failure.  The  book  begins 
with  a  relentlessly  realistic  account  of  the  sufferings 
of  an  American  polar  expedition.  The  leader  comes 
back  crippled  as  a  result  of  exposure,  and  the  rest  of 
the  story  is  concerned  with  his  unsuccessful  efforts 
to  avoid  a  marriage  with  the  girl  with  whom  he  was 
in  love  before  he  started. 

Even  in  his  crippled  state  the  hero  retains  charac 
teristics  of  the  frontier  and  the  rough  stone  age  from 
which  he  hails ;  there  are  single  episodes  in  the  book 
that  take  us  back  directly  into  the  primitive  and  the 
elemental,  and  that  demonstrate  conclusively  the  au 
thor's  growing  power  to  hammer  his  material  into 
shape,  and  to  drive  the  impression  of  it  indelibly  into 
the  minds  of  his  readers. 

In  McTeague,  1899,  he  begins  to  hammer  in 
the  impression  on  the  first  page,  with  the  first  sen 
tence.  "  It  was  Sunday,  and,  according  to  his  cus 
tom  on  that  day,  McTeague  took  his  dinner  at  two 
in  the  afternoon  at  the  car-conductor's  coffee- joint 
in  Polk  Street.  He  had  a  thick  gray  soup;  heavy, 
under-done  meat,  very  hot,  on  a  cold  plate ;  two  kinds 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  vegetables ;  and  a  sort  of  suet  pudding,  full  of 
strong  butter  and  sugar.  On  his  way  back  to  his 
office,  one  block  above,  he  stopped  at  Joe  Frenna's 
saloon  and  bought  a  pitcher  of  steam  beer.  It  was 
his  habit  to  leave  the  pitcher  there  on  his  way  to  din 
ner. 

"  Once  in  his  office,  or  as  he  called  it  on  his  sign 
board  '  Dental  Parlors,'  he  took  off  his  coat  and 
shoes,  unbuttoned  his  vest,  and,  having  crammed  his 
little  stove  full  of  coke,  lay  back  in  his  operating 
chair  at  the  bay  window  reading  the  paper,  drinking 
his  beer,  and  smoking  his  huge,  porcelain  pipe  while 
his  food  digested,  crop  full,  stupid  and  warm.  By 
and  by,  gorged  with  steam  beer,  and  overcome  by 
the  heat  of  the  room,  the  cheap  tobacco,  and  the  ef 
fects  of  his  heavy  meal  he  dropped  off  to  sleep.  Late 
in  the  afternoon  his  canary  bird  in  its  gilt  cage,  just 
over  his  head,  began  to  sing.  He  woke  slowly,  fin 
ished  the  rest  of  his  beer  —  very  flat  and  stale  by 
this  time  —  and  taking  down  his  concertina  from  the 
book-case  where  in  week  days  it  kept  the  company  of 
seven  volumes  of  Allen's  Practical  Dentist,  played 
upon  it  some  half-dozen  very  mournful  airs." 

Of  this  concertina  and  this  canary  bird  we  shall 
hear  more  later.  They  are  at  once  symbols  and  vital 
phases  of  McTeague's  nature,  and  parts  of  the 
plot. 

Superficially  the  resemblance  of  Zola's  method  and 
material  is  apparent,  but  there  is  more  than  mere 
realism  for  realism's  sake  here.  One  may  justly  com 
pare  the  portrait  of  McTeague  in  his  operating 
chair  to  any  in  Rembrandt's  gallery  of  scenes  of 
squalor,  and  find  more  in  it,  as  life  to-day  means 


FRANK  NORRIS  143 

more  than  it  did  in  Rembrandt's  time,  and  as  fiction  in 
a  master's  hands  transcends  painting  in  its  breadth 
and  depth  of  suggestion  and  appeal. 

There  is  atmosphere  of  more  than  steam  beer, 
cheap  tobacco  and  coke  fumes  in  these  first  thirty  lines. 
It  is  possible  for  the  reader  of  some  experience  to 
feel  immediately  that  here  is  life  in  a  very  real  and 
significant  aspect,  that  the  apparent  grossness  of 
material  and  statement  is  only  the  sign  for  something 
significant  that  the  book  promises  to  reveal. 

For  the  rest  of  the  Plain  People  for  whom  Norris 
wrote  —  anyone  competent  to  say  "  Why  I  know, 
or  I've  lived  with  people  just  like  that" — the  inter 
est  grips  one  from  the  first  chapter  to  the  last. 

In  the  next  two  pages  one  learns  that  McTeague 
is  a  primitive  product  of  an  artificial  environment. 
Ten  years  before  he  had  been  a  car  boy  at  the  Big 
Dipper  mine  in  Placer  County.  He  goes  away  as 
the  assistant  of  a  traveling  dentist,  and  makes  him 
self  also  a  dentist  by  main  strength.  "  McTeague 
was  a  young  giant  carrying  his  shock  of  blond  hair 
six  feet  three  inches  from  the  ground ;  moving  his  im 
mense  limbs,  heavy  with  ropes  of  muscle,  slowly, 
ponderously.  His  hands  were  enormous,  red  and  cov 
ered  with  a  fell  of  stiff  yellow  hair;  they  were  hard  as 
wooden  mallets,  strong  as  wires,  the  hands  of  the  old 
time  car  boy.  Often  he  dispensed  with  forceps  and 
extracted  a  refractory  tooth  with  his  thumb  and 
finger." 

It  was  in  the  nature  of  things  and  the  exigencies 
of  dental  practice  that  McTeague  should  fall  in  love 
with  Trina  Sieppe.  This  comes  about  through  the 
intervention  of  Marcus  Shouler,  the  dentist's  one  in- 


144     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

timate  friend,  who  occupies  a  room  on  the  floor  above. 
Marcus  is  the  assistant  in  Old  Grannis's  dog  hospital, 
just  off  Polk  Street,  four  blocks  above.  His  cousin 
Trina  has  fallen  out  of  a  swing  at  a  picnic  and  broken 
off  a  front  tooth. 

She  comes  to  McTeague  to  have  the  damage  re 
paired  and  we  hear  much  about  proximate  cavities, 
hook  broaches,  corundum  burrs,  dental  necrosis,  pala 
tine  surfaces,  dowels,  bayonet  forceps,  hoe-excavators 
and  other  minutiae  of  the  dentist's  art. 

In  the  midst  of  this  unromantic  setting  a  romance 
in  real  life  develops.  McTeague  keeps  one  of  Trina's 
teeth  wrapped  up  in  a  bit  of  newspaper  in  his  waist 
coat  pocket.  The  time  comes  when  it  is  a  positive 
anguish  to  him  to  hurt  her. 

"  Trina  was  very  small  and  prettily  made.  Her 
face  was  round  and  rather  pale;  her  eyes  long  and 
narrow  and  blue  like  the  half  open  eyes  of  a  little 
baby;  her  lips  and  the  lobes  of  her  tiny  ears  were 
pale,  a  little  suggestive  of  anaemia ;  it  was  to  her  hair 
that  one's  attention  was  most  attracted.  Heaps  and 
heaps  of  blue  black  coils  and  braids,  a  royal  coil  of 
swarthy  bands,  a  veritable  sable  tiara  heavy,  abun 
dant,  odorous.  All  the  vitality  that  should  have 
given  color  to  her  face  seemed  to  have  been  absolved 
by  this  marvelous  hair." 

McTeague  kisses  Trina  while  she  is  under  the  in 
fluence  of  ether.  When  she  comes  to,  he  asks  her  to 
marry  him  off  hand,  and  she  becomes  violently  sick. 
The  dental  sittings  come  to  an  end,  he  goes  to  a 
picnic  with  her  and  her  family  and  Marcus.  Marcus, 
who  has  been  sweet  on  Trina  himself,  decides  to  be 
magnanimous  and  pull  out  when  he  sees  how  his 


FRANK  NORRIS  145 

friend  is  affected.  McTeague  can  neither  eat  nor 
sleep.  Trina  becomes  impressed  with  his  primitive 
masculinity,  and  their  marriage  becomes  inevitable 
when  she  learns  that  she  has  won  a  lottery  prize  of 
five  thousand  dollars  on  a  ticket  bought  by  chance. 

Shortly  after  her  marriage  Trina  begins  to  be 
come  a  miser.  Her  money  is  invested  at  six  per  cent, 
with  her  uncle  Oelberman  who  owns  a  big  toy  store 
in  the  Mission  district.  She  begins  to  earn  three  or 
four  dollars  a  week  by  making  toy  animals  for  Noah's 
arks.  At  the  cost  of  severe  mental  and  moral  agony 
she  deducts  two  hundred  dollars  from  the  five  thou 
sand  to  pay  for  her  trousseau  and  the  other  initial 
expenses  of  housekeeping.  Thereafter  her  one  aim 
and  purpose  in  life  is  to  keep  her  five  thousand  intact 
and  to  add  to  it. 

McTeague  quarrels  with  Marcus  about  her.  After 
a  time  he  learns  that  he  can  no  longer  practice  as  a 
dentist  because  he  has  not  graduated  from  a  dental 
college,  and  the  law  forbids.  He  fails  to  find  em 
ployment  with  a  firm  of  dental  manufacturers ;  his  in 
struments  and  his  few  household  goods  have  to  be 
sold.  So  is  the  huge  gilded  tooth  that  hung  outside 
his  window  and  which  was  Trina's  wedding  present 
to  him. 

Trina  refuses  to  let  a  cent  of  her  five  thousand  dol 
lars  be  touched ;  they  move  into  poorer  quarters ;  she 
develops  a  talent  for  concealing  from  him  the  truth 
about  the  smallest  and  most  necessary  expenditures ; 
she  refuses  to  allow  him  car  fare  when  he  is  looking 
for  work ;  she  continues  to  save  little  by  little,  while 
they  are  both  living  on  her  interest  and  her  earnings 
as  a  toy  maker. 


146     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

McTeague  begins  to  drink,  and  Trina  begins  to 
turn  her  savings  into  gold  and  to  play  with  it  and 
fondle  it  as  the  miser  of  tradition  does.  McTeague 
develops  a  habit  of  putting  the  ends  of  her  fingers 
into  his  mouth  and  biting  them  till  the  blood  comes 
when  he  wants  money.  When  she  has  amassed 
more  than  four  hundred  dollars,  he  steals  it  and  runs 
away. 

He  comes  back  when  it  is  all  gone  and  he  is  starv 
ing.  Trina  refuses  to  give  him  a  cent.  She  has  sold 
his  concertina  in  his  absence.  He  finds  himself  abso 
lutely  without  resources.  Unexpectedly,  through  an 
accident  which  he  witnesses,  he  gets  a  job  as  piano- 
handler  for  a  music  store  at  six  dollars  a  week. 

He  lives  alone  with  his  canary  bird  for  some 
months  and  misses  his  concertina.  He  finds  it  by 
chance  in  the  second  hand  department  of  the  store. 
He  knows  that  Trina  has  sold  it.  He  pays  down  as 
deposit  the  four  dollars  that  he  has  in  his  pocket 
and  sets  out  to  get  the  balance  of  the  eleven  dollars 
needed  to  buy  it  back  from  Trina. 

Meantime  Trina  has  gone  from  bad  to  worse.  The 
"  non-poisonous  "  paint  that  she  uses  for  the  toy 
animals  causes  blood  poisoning  in  the  fingers  that 
McTeague  has  bitten.  When  she  comes  out  of  the 
hospital  with  only  a  claw  left  in  place  of  her  right 
hand,  she  secures  employment  as  a  scrub  woman  for 
a  slum  kindergarten.  She  draws  her  money  grad 
ually  out  of  her  uncle's  business  and  keeps  the  gold 
in  her  rooms.  She  becomes  a  slattern;  she  loses  in 
terest  in  all  but  the  actual  sight  and  feel  of  the  gold. 

McTeague  comes  to  her  after  his  day's  work,  for 
his  seven  dollars.  On  the  way  he  drinks  many 


FRANK  NORRIS  147 

whiskeys  and  decides  to  have  the  whole  five  thou 
sand.  Trina  pleads  with  him  and  fights  him  till  her 
strength  fails.  Towards  morning  she  dies. 

In  the  meantime  McTeague  has  carried  off  the 
gold  and  his  own  small  belongings  in  a  blanket  roll, 
with  the  canary  in  its  cage  on  top.  He  harks  back 
by  blind  instinct  to  the  wild  and  the  Big  Dipper  Mine. 
On  his  way  he  passes  through  the  woods. 

"  The  day  was  very  hot,  and  the  silence  of  high 
noon  lay  thick  and  close  between  the  steep  slopes  of 
the  canons  like  an  invisible,  muffling  fluid.  .  .  .  The 
vast,  moveless  heat  seemed  to  distill  countless  odors 
from  the  brush  —  odors  of  warm  sap,  of  pine  needles, 
and  of  tar  weed,  and  above  all  the  medicinal  odor  of 
the  witch  hazel.  As  far  as  he  could  look,  uncounted 
multitudes  of  trees  and  of  manzanita  bushes  were 
quietly  and  rnotionlessly  growing,  growing,  grow 
ing.  A  tremendous  immeasurable  life  pushed 
heavenward  without  a  sound,  without  a  motion.  At 
turns  of  the  road,  on  the  higher  points,  canons  dis 
closed  themselves,  far  away,  gigantic  grooves  in  the 
landscape,  deep  blue  in  the  distance,  opening  into 
one  another,  ocean-deep,  silent,  huge  and  suggestive 
of  colossal  primeval  forces  held  in  reserve.  .  .  .  The 
entire  region  was  untamed.  In  some  places  east  of 
the  Mississippi  nature  is  cozy,  intimate,  small  and 
home  like  like  a  good-natured  house  wife.  In  Placer 
County,  California,  she  is  a  vast  unconquered  brute 
of  the  Pliocene  epoch,  savage,  sullen,  and  magnifi 
cently  indifferent  to  man. 

"  But  there  were  men  in  the  mountains  like  lice 
in  mammoth's  hides,  fighting  them  stubbornly  now 
with  hydraulic  '  monitors,'  now  with  drill  and  dyna- 


148     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

mite,  boring  into  the  vitals  of  them  or  tearing  away 
great  yellow  gravelly  scars  in  the  flanks  of  them, 
sucking  their  blood,  extracting  gold  .  .  .  one  heard 
the  prolonged  thunder  of  the  stamp  mill,  the  crusher, 
the  insatiable  monster,  gnashing  the  rocks  to  powder 
with  its  long  iron  teeth,  vomiting  them  out  again  in 
a  thin  stream  of  wet  gray  mud.  Its  enormous  maw, 
fed  night  and  day  with  the  car-boy's  loads,  gorged 
itself  with  gravel  and  spat  out  the  gold  .  .  .  growl 
ing  over  its  endless  meal,  like  some  savage  animal, 
some  legendary  dragon,  some  fabulous  beast,  symbol 
of  inordinate  and  monstrous  gluttony." 

McTeague  gets  employment,  unrecognized,  at  his 
old  job.  The  life  pleases  him  beyond  words.  After 
a  few  weeks  the  instinct  of  the  animal  to  avoid  the 
hunters  warns  him;  he  goes  wide  around  sharp  cor 
ners;  he  wakes  suddenly  and  prowls  about  the  bunk 
house  by  night ;  finally  he  disappears  two  days  before 
the  sheriff  and  the  deputies  from  San  Francisco 
reach  the  mine. 

McTeague  heads  south  for  Mexico.  For  a  time 
his  suspicions  are  dormant.  He  makes  a  deal  with 
an  old  miner  and  they  prospect  for  gold  near  Death 
Valley.  They  find  it,  and  again  the  instinct  of  flight 
gets  the  best  of  the  dentist.  He  leaves  the  mine  and 
his  partner  by  night.  He  heads  south  along  the 
western  side  of  the  valley.  Suddenly  he  decides  to 
evade  pursuit  by  crossing  it. 

Here  Marcus  Shouler  who  has  been  working  on  a 
ranch  in  the  neighborhood  and  who  joins  the  sheriff's 
force  as  a  volunteer  comes  up  with  him. 

Marcus  gets  the  drop.  McTeague  who  has 
neither  knife  nor  gun  with  him  puts  his  hands  up. 


FRANK  NORRIS  149 

McTeaguc's  mule  which  has  eaten  loco  weed  and 
which  carries  the  last  food  and  water  left  to  the  two 
men  breaks  away.  The  two  men  run  after  it.  Mar 
cus  fires  his  last  shot,  the  mule  falls  and  bursts  the 
canteen.  The  two  men  come  to  blows  over  the  di 
vision  of  the  money,  Trina's  five  thousand  dollars, 
the  canvas  sackful  tied  to  the  horn  of  the  saddle. 

"  Suddenly  the  men  grappled,  and  in  another  in 
stant  were  rolling  and  struggling  upon  the  hot 
white  ground.  McTeague  thrust  Marcus  backward 
till  he  tripped  and  fell  over  the  body  of  the  dead 
mule.  The  little  bird  cage  broke  from  the  saddle 
with  the  violence  of  their  fall,  and  rolled  out  upon 
the  ground,  the  flour  bags  slipping  from  it.  Mc- 
Teague  tore  the  revolver  from  Marcus's  grip  and 
struck  out  with  it  blindly.  Clouds  of  alkali  dust, 
fine  and  pungent,  enveloped  the  two  fighting  men,  all 
but  strangling  them. 

"  McTeague  did  not  know  how  he  had  killed  his 
enemy,  but  all  at  once  Marcus  grew  still  beneath  his 
blows.  Then  there  was  a  sudden  last  return  of  en 
ergy.  McTeague's  right  wrrist  was  caught,  some 
thing  clicked  upon  it,  then  the  struggling  body  fell 
limp  and  motionless  with  a  long  breath. 

"  As  McTeague  rose  to  his  feet  he  felt  a  pull  at  his 
right  wrist;  something  held  it  fast.  Looking  down 
he  saw  that  Marcus  in  that  last  struggle  had  found 
strength  to  handcuff  their  right  wrists  together. 
Marcus  was  dead  now;  McTeague  was  locked  to  the 
body.  All  about  him,  vast,  interminable,  stretched 
the  measureless  leagues  of  Death  Valley. 

"  McTeague  remained  stupidly  looking  around 
him,  now  at  the  distant  horizon,  now  at  the  ground, 


150     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

now  at  the  half-dead  canary  chittering  feebly  in  its 
little  gilt  prison." 

There  are  few  novels  that  end  as  effectively,  as  in 
evitably,  as  much  to  the  purpose  and  with  as  little 
apparent  waste  of  technical  labor  and  ingenuity. 

The  symbolism  of  the  huge  tooth  has  been  vari 
ously  commented  upon.  The  same  symbolism  ap 
pears  as  the  parallel  story  of  Maria  Macapa,  a  Mex 
ican  woman  not  quite  right  in  her  head,  who  talks 
about  a  service  of  gold  plate  that  her  family  once 
owned,  and  who  is  married  and  murdered  by  Zerkow, 
a  Jew  junk  dealer,  on  the  chance  that  she  may  have 
hoarded  and  hidden  it  somewhere  in  their  tenement  as 
Trina  hoarded  her  own  gold. 

Norris  never  appears  primarily  as  a  preacher. 
He  tells  us  in  his  own  words :  "  People  who  read  ap 
pear  at  last  to  have  grasped  their  own  precept,  the 
novel  must  not  preach,  but  the  purpose  of  the  story 
must  be  subordinate  to  the  story  itself." 

At  the  same  time  he  says :  "  As  though  it  were  im 
possible  to  write  a  novel  without  a  purpose  even  if  it 
is  only  the  purpose  to  amuse."  And  it  is  sufficiently 
evident  to  anyone  who  takes  time  to  reflect,  that  his 
purpose  here  is  not  to  achieve  a  literary  tour  de  force, 
realistic  and  symbolistic  at  once,  but  to  put  con 
clusively  and  unforgettably  before  the  mind  of  the 
average  reader  the  result  of  the  commonest  crime  of 
civilization  on  two  or  three  obscurely  typical  lives  in 
San  Francisco  as  the  plain  people  see  it  to-day. 
Norris  does  not  preach  in  the  obvious  and  restricted 
sense.  He  makes  us  see  unmistakably  here  and  later 
that  life  is  greater  than  its  accidents.  Still  less  does 
he  pretend,  through  any  worship  of  sham  refinements 


+.  FRANK  NORRIS  151 

or  false  heroics,  that  the  civilization  most  written  up 
and  gilded  over  is  greater  or  better  than  the  result 
of  its  everyday  failures  and  crimes. 

n. 

The  Octopus  was  published  in  1901.  At  that 
time  Norris  unquestionably  felt  his  powers  and  his  re 
sponsibilities  as  he  voiced  them  later  in  the  initial  es 
say  of  The  Responsibilities  of  the  Novelist  (published 
in  1 901). 

"  More  than  all  others  the  successful  novelist  .  .  . 
more  even  than  the  minister  and  the  editor,  he  should 
feel  his  public  and  watch  his  every  word,  testing  care 
fully  his  every  utterance,  weighing  with  the  most  re 
lentless  precision  his  every  statement,  in  a  word 
possess  a  sense  of  his  responsibilities. 

"  For  the  novel  is  the  great  expression  of  modern 
life.  .  .  .  Each  age  speaks  with  its  own  peculiar 
organ  and  has  left  the  Word  for  us  moderns  to  read 
and  understand.  .  .  .  To-day  is  the  day  of  the  novel. 
...  If  the  novel  was  not  something  more  than  a 
simple  diversion  ...  a  means  of  whiling  away  a  dull 
evening,  a  long  railroad  journey,  it  would  not,  be 
lieve  me,  remain  for  another  day. 

"  If  the  novel  then,  is  popular,  it  is  popular  with  a 
reason,  a  vital  inherent  reason ;  that  is  to  say  it  is 
essential.  Essential  .  .  .  because  it  expresses  mod 
ern  life  better  than  architecture,  better  than  paint 
ing,  better  than  poetry,  better  than  music.  It  is  as 
necessary  to  the  civilization  of  the  twentieth  century 
as  the  violin  is  to  Kubelik,  as  the  piano  is  to  Pade- 
rewski.  ...  It  is  an  instrument,  a  tool,  a  weapon,  a 
vehicle.  It  is  that  thing  which  in  the  hand  of  a  man 


152     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

makes  him  civilized  and  no  longer  a  savage,  because  it 
gives  him  a  power  of  durable,  permanent  expression." 

That  the  work  of  Frank  Norris  is  durable  because 
it  deals  with  the  material  of  our  common  national 
life,  that  his  expression  is  permanent  because  it  is 
the  expression  of  truth  itself,  is  one  of  the  things  that 
his  fellow  countrymen  and  country-women  are  grad 
ually  coming  to  see. 

The  Octopus  has  belonged  to  America  and  to 
the  world  for  eleven  years.  Norris  is  still  a  prophet 
without  honor  in  some  sections,  some  classes,  some 
literary,  scholastic,  cultured  and  educated  circles  of 
his  own  country.  At  the  same  time  the  book  and  the 
ideal  of  racial  expression,  of  obligation  and  service 
that  it  represents,  have  come  to  stay  in  America  as 
surely  as  the  Rail  Road,  the  Octopus  of  steam  and 
steel,  the  capitalistic  aggression  and  responsibility 
that  it  pillories,  that  it  interprets,  that  in  its  broad 
results  it  justifies. 

Norris  has  been  a  pioneer  of  America  and  to 
morrow  not  only  in  his  racial  inheritance,  in  his  spirit, 
his  material  and  method  of  work,  but  in  his  partial 
acceptance  of  the  fact,  that  the  novel  of  to-morrow, 
in  America  of  all  countries,  must  be  built  on  broad- 
gauge  lines ;  that  it  must  be  a  vehicle  or  a  train  of 
vehicles  fit  for  all ;  that  its  right  of  way  must  be  made 
permanent  in  its  possession  of  elemental  and  univer 
sal  truth ;  that  sham  and  false  pretense  must  be  as 
abhorrent  to  it  as  false  work,  unstandardized,  in  the 
construction  of  a  steel  bridge;  that  jerry  building 
in  the  work  of  any  novelist,  who  is  able  to  write  for 
an  audience  of  millions  or  hundreds  of  thousands, 
must  in  time  come  to  be  looked  upon  with  the  same 


FRANK  NORRIS  153 

abhorrence  as  jerry  building  in  the  foundation  piers 
of  the  permanent  way  over  which  millions  travel 
yearly. 

Novels  like  The  Octopus  are  coming  to  be  the 
great  bridges  of  thought,  with  their  trains  and  equip 
ment,  that  bear  any  chance  way-farer  who  may  con 
nect  at  any  point  on  the  line  to  the  great  centers  of 
human  thought  and  striving.  The  public  has  a  right 
to  demand  that  they  be  strongly  and  securely  built. 
It  has  a  further  right  to  demand  that  they  be  built 
purposefully;  that  they  connect  with  main  terminals 
or  junction  points,  themselves ;  that  they  do  not  waste 
its  time  and  delude  it  with  false  hopes  and  vain  as 
sumptions,  only  to  leave  it  stranded  in  the  wilds  or  at 
some  insignificant  way  station. 

"  Because  it  (the  novel)  is  so  all-powerful  to-day, 
the  people  turn  to  him  who  widens  this  instrument 
with  every  degree  of  confidence.  They  expect,  and 
rightly,  that  results  shall  be  commensurate  with 
means  .  .  .  the  fact  is  indisputable  that  no  art  that 
is  not  in  the  end  understood  by  the  People  can  live, 
or  ever  did  live,  a  single  generation.  In  the  larger 
view,  in  the  last  analysis,  the  People  pronounce  the 
final  judgment.  ...  Is  it  not  expedient  to  set  it 
forth  fairly?  Is  it  not,  in  Heaven's  name,  essential 
that  the  people  should  hear  not  a  lie  but  the  Truth  ?  " 

The  first  thing  noticeable  about  The  Octopus 
is  that  it  is  a  True  Story.  It  is  true  in  its  view 
point  and  its  method,  which  have  the  directness  and 
the  elemental  insistence  of  nature  itself.  The  story 
of  the  fight  of  the  Ranchers  of  the  San  Joaquin  Val 
ley  with  the  Southern  Pacific  railroad  over  the  re 
valuation  of  the  lands  leased  to  them  by  the  Corpora- 


154     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

tion,  and  the  tendency  of  the  Octopus  to  charge 
invariably  all  the  traffic  will  stand,  is  absolutely  veri 
fiable  in  the  history  of  the  State  of  California. 

It  is  true  in  its  epic  sweep  and  broadening  inten 
sity  of  interest ;  true  technically  and  spiritually ;  true 
as  poetry  and  as  prose ;  true  in  its  comprehensive 
knowledge  of  life  in  the  mass  and  in  little ;  true  in  its 
feeling  for  human  nature,  in  the  individual  and  the 
aggregate ;  true  in  its  revelation  of  something  more 
than  mere  humanity  —  something  to  which  all  human 
personalities,  all  human  laws  and  desires  are  sub 
servient  —  that  inspires  and  sustains  it. 

For  years,  people  here  and  abroad  have  been  look 
ing  for  The  Great  American  Novel.  The  Octo 
pus  is  great.  It  is  as  essentially  national  as  the 
theme  and  the  democracy  that  it  interprets  is  great 
and  American.  It  is  more  than  national;  it  is  ra 
cial.  It  is  more  than  a  novel;  it  is  an  epic:  The 
Epic  of  the  Wheat,  complete  in  itself  without  The 
Pit  and  the  third  unpublished  member  of  the  un 
finished  trilogy. 

Like  all  human  productions  it  has  its  faults.  They 
are  essentially  and  typically  the  faults  of  the  people 
that  it  portrays.  They  count  for  little  beside  its 
more  virile  and  lasting  qualities.  In  the  last  analysis 
they  make  the  book  more  truly  representative  of  the 
racial  temperament  that  has  produced  it. 

Norris  has  said  himself :  "  For  the  novelist  the  pur 
pose  of  the  novel,  the  problem  he  is  to  solve,  is  to  his 
story  what  the  key  note  is  to  the  sonata."  Con 
densed  into  five  words  the  problem  of  The  Octopus 
is:  "  Why  is  the  railroad?  "  And  the  key-note  of 
the  book  is  sounded  on  the  first  page  and  in  the  first 


FRANK  NORRIS  155 

sentence  by  the  blowing  of  a  steam  whistle  that 
Presley,  the  "  lunger  "  and  minor  poet,  knows  must 
come  from  the  railroad  shops  near  the  depot  at 
Bonneville. 

Presley  is  the  medium  through  which  much  of  the 
story  is  told. 

Presley  symbolizes  minor  literature  here  and  every 
where.  He  wants  to  write  the  Song  of  the  West  in 
hexameters.  At  first,  life  as  he  sees  it  around  him  on 
the  great  Magnus  Derrick  wheat  ranch,  seems  crude 
and  unsympathetic.  Later  he  becomes  tremendously 
interested  and  a  warm  partisan  in  the  losing  struggle 
of  the  ranchers  and  the  people  against  the  railroad. 
He  writes  one  successful  poem,  The  Toilers,  which  is 
read  and  copied  everywhere.  With  this  one  excep 
tion  he  continues  incapable  as  writer  and  as  man, 
from  first  to  last. 

The  book  begins  in  the  last  half  of  September,  the 
very  end  of  the  dry  season.  "  The  harvest  was  just 
over.  Nothing  but  stubble  remained  on  the  ground. 
.  .  .  The  silence  was  infinite.  After  the  harvest, 
small  though  that  harvest  had  been,  the  ranches 
seemed  asleep.  It  was  as  though  the  earth  after  its 
period  of  reproduction,  its  pains  of  labor,  had  been 
delivered  of  the  fruit  of  its  loins  and  now  slept  the 
sleep  of  exhaustion. 

"  It  was  the  period  between  seasons  when  nothing 
was  being  done,  when  the  natural  forces  seemed  to 
hang  suspended.  There  was  no  rain,  there  was  no 
wind,  there  was  no  growth,  no  life ;  the  very  stubble 
had  no  force  even  to  rot.  The  sun  alone  moved." 

Presley  stays  to  talk  with  various  ranchers  on  his 


156     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

way  from  the  home  ranch  of  Los  Muertos,  where  he  is 
living  as  the  guest  of  Magnus  Derrick.  He  hurries 
on  on  his  bicycle  at  last,  to  Guadalahara,  for  a  Span 
ish  dinner  at  Solotari's.  There  he  meets  an  old  Mexi 
can  who  tells  him  stories  full  of  local  color  of  the  life 
of  the  past.  He  meets  Vanamee,  a  sheep-herder,  with 
his  herd ;  he  stops  at  the  old  Spanish  mission ;  he  chats 
there  with  Sarria  the  priest,  and  a  wider  sweep  of 
his  epic  of  the  West  and  the  past  unrolls  itself  be 
fore  him. 

"  It  was  in  Vanamee's  flight  into  the  wilderness, 
the  story  of  the  Long  Trail;  the  sunsets  behind  the 
altar-like  mesas,  the  baking  desolation  of  the  deserts, 
the  strenuous  fierce  life  of  forgotten  towns  down  there, 
far  off,  lost  below  the  horizons  of  the  southwest,  the 
sonorous  music  of  unfamiliar  names  —  Quijota, 
Uintah,  Sonora,  Laredo,  Uncompahgre.  It  was  in 
the  mission,  with  its  cracked  bells,  the  decaying  walls, 
its  venerable  sun-dial,  its  fountain  and  old  garden, 
and  in  the  Mission  Fathers  themselves,  the  priests,  the 
padres,  planting  the  first  wheat  and  oil  and  wine  to 
produce  the  elements  of  the  Sacrament  —  a  trinity  of 
great  industries,  taking  their  rise  in  a  religious 
rite." 

As  he  crosses  the  railroad  on  his  way  home  after 
nightfall,  a  loose  engine  shoots  by  him  at  full  speed. 
Just  beyond  it  cuts  through  Vanamee's  flock  of  sheep 
which  have  strayed  upon  the  track. 

"  It  was  a  slaughter,  a  massacre  of  the  innocents 
...  to  the  right  and  left,  all  the  width  of  the  right 
of  way  the  little  bodies  had  been  flung;  backs  were 
snapped  against  the  fence  posts,  brains  knocked  out ; 
caught  on  the  barbs  of  the  wire,  wedged  in,  the  bodies 


FRANK  NORRIS  157 

hung  suspended.  Under-foot  it  was  terrible.  The 
black  blood,  winking  in  the  star-light,  sank  down  into 
the  clinkers  between  the  tracks  with  a  prolonged 
sucking  murmur. 

"  Presley  turned  away,  horror-struck,  sick  at  heart. 
.  .  .  The  hideous  ruin  in  the  engine's  path  drove  all 
thoughts  of  his  poem  from  his  mind.  .  .  .  Then 
faint  and  prolonged,  across  the  levels  of  the  ranch, 
he  heard  the  engine  whistling.  .  .  .  Again  and  again 
at  rapid  intervals  in  its  flying  course.  .  .  .  Presley 
saw  again  in  his  imagination,  the  galloping  monster, 
the  terror  of  steel  and  of  steam,  with  its  single  eye, 
cyclopean,  red,  shooting  from  horizon  to  horizon,  but 
saw  it  now  as  the  symbol  of  a  vast  power,  huge,  ter 
rible,  flinging  the  echo  of  its  thunder  over  all  the 
reaches  of  the  valley,  leaving  blood  and  destruction 
in  its  path  .  .  .  the  monster,  the  Colossus,  the  Octo 
pus." 

Before  the  fall  plowing  begins,  we  become  ac 
quainted  with  S.  Behrman,  agent  of  the  railroad  in 
Bonneville,  banker,  real  estate  agent,  grain  dealer, 
mortgage  holder,  local  political  boss.  His  portrait 
drawn  in  a  dozen  lines  —  his  huge  paunch  and  jowl, 
his  invariable  highly  varnished  hat  of  brown  straw, 
the  light  brown  linen  vest  stamped  with  innumer 
able  interlocked  horse  shoes,  the  heavy  watch  chain 
of  hollow  links  that  clinks,  as  he  breathes,  against  the 
vast  buttons  of  imitation  mother-of-pearl  —  dis 
counts  that  by  Howells  of  Bartley  Hubbard. 

From  him  Magnus  Derrick  and  Harran,  his 
younger  son,  learn  that  the  improved  plows  ordered 
by  them  from  the  East  have  to  go  through  to  San 
Francisco  and  be  reshipped  to  Los  Muertos  at  pro- 


158     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

portionately  extortionate  freight  rates  before  their 
owners  can  lay  hands  on  them. 

Annixter,  a  neighbor  of  theirs,  sees  the  plows  go 
by  on  their  way  North.  He  begins  plowing  on  one 
division  of  his  own  ranch  after  the  first  heavy  rain. 
There  are  thirty-five  plows  ranged  en  echelon,  each 
with  ten  horses  and  five  shares.  Vanamee  gets  a  job 
as  driver  of  one  of  the  teams. 

"  He  heard  the  horse  hoofs  by  the  myriads  crush 
ing  down  easily,  deeply,  into  the  loam,  the  prolonged 
clinking  of  trace  chains,  the  working  of  the  smooth 
brown  flanks  in  the  harness,  the  clatter  of  wooden 
hames,  the  champing  of  bits,  the  click  of  iron  shoes 
against  the  pebbles,  the  brittle  stubble  of  the  sur 
face  ground,  crackling  and  snapping  as  the  furrows 
turned,  the  sonorous,  steady  breaths  wrenched  from 
the  deep,  laboring  chests  strap-bound,  shining  with 
sweat,  and  all  along  the  line  the  voices  of  the  men 
talking  to  the  horses.  Everywhere  there  were  vi 
sions  of  glossy  brown  backs,  straining,  heaving, 
swollen  with  muscle ;  harness  streaked  with  specks  of 
froth ;  broad,  cup-shaped  hoofs,  heavy  with  brown 
loam;  men's  faces  red  with  tan,  blue  overalls  spotted 
with  axle  grease;  muscled  hands,  the  knuckles  whit 
ened  in  their  grip  on  the  reins ;  and  through  it  all  the 
ammoniacal  smell  of  the  horses,  the  bitter  reek  of 
perspiration  of  beasts  and  men,  the  aroma  of  warm 
leather,  the  scent  of  dead  stubble;  and  stronger  and 
more  penetrating  than  everything  else,  the  heavy 
enervating  odor  of  the  upturned  living  earth. 

"  It  was  the  long  stroking  caress  —  vigorous,  male, 
powerful  —  for  which  the  Earth  seemed  panting ; 
the  heroic  embrace  of  a  multitude  of  iron  hands  grip- 


FRANK  NORRIS  159 

ping  deep  into  the  warm  brown  flesh  of  the  hand  that 
quivered  responsive  and  passionate  under  this  rude 
advance,  so  robust  as  to  be  almost  an  assault,  so  vio 
lent  as  to  be  veritably  brutal.  There  under  the  sun 
and  under  the  speckless  sheen  of  the  sky,  the  wooing 
of  the  Titan  began,  the  two  world-forces,  the  elemen 
tal  Male  and  Female,  locked  in  a  colossal  embrace,  at 
grapples  in  the  throes  of  an  infinite  desire,  at  once 
terrible  and  divine,  knowing  no  law,  untamed,  sav 
age,  natural,  sublime." 

In  the  meantime  the  ranchers  hear  that  the  land 
they  have  leased  from  the  railroad  is  to  be  revalued 
and  graded  higher,  after  they  have  borrowed  to  the 
limit  to  harvest  their  crops,  anticipating  a  bonanza 
year.  They  decide  to  fight  fire  with  fire,  and  to  use 
money  to  secure  the  nomination  and  election  of  two 
of  the  three  members  of  the  state  railroad  commis 
sion  that  fixes  the  valuation.  One  of  the  two  mem 
bers  that  they  feel  they  can  count  on  is  Lyman  Der 
rick  the  eldest  son  of  Magnus,  a  corporation  lawyer 
in  San  Francisco.  Magnus  who  is  a  statesman,  a 
politician  of  the  old  school,  holds  out  against  bribery 
till  word  comes  to  him  and  his  friends  that  the  rail 
road  intends  to  raise  the  new  valuation,  at  which  the 
land  can  be  bought  in,  to  something  like  ten  times 
the  original  one. 

This  happens  at  a  dance  given  as  a  house-warming 
for  Annixter's  new  barn,  and  after  a  Homeric  com 
bat  between  Annixter  and  Delaney,  a  discharged  cow 
boy,  who  rides  into  the  middle  of  the  dancing  floor 
to  shoot  the  place  up. 

Delaney  is  disabled  by  a  shot  in  the  wrist  and  put 
to  rout.  Trouble  between  him  and  Annixter  has 


160     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

arisen  over  Hilma  Tree,  a  girl  employed  by  Annixter 
in  his  dairy.  Annixter,  a  confirmed  bachelor  and 
woman-hater,  finally  decides  to  marry  her  after  she 
and  her  family  have  run  away  from  him. 

"  Abruptly  there  was  presented  to  his  mind's  eye 
a  picture  of  the  years  to  come.  .  .  .  He  saw  Hilma 
his  own,  for  better  or  for  worse,  for  richer  or  for 
poorer,  all  barriers  down  between  them,  he  giving  him 
self  to  her  as  freely,  as  nobly,  as  she  had  given  her 
self  to  him.  By  a  supreme  effort,  not  of  the  will  but 
of  the  emotion,  he  fought  his  way  across  the  vast 
gulf  that  had  for  a  time  gaped  between  Hilma  and 
the  idea  of  his  marriage  ...  in  that  moment  into 
his  harsh,  unlovely  world  a  new  idea  was  born  .  .  . 
Out  of  the  dark  furrows  of  his  soul,  up  from  the  deep, 
rugged  recesses  of  his  being,  something  rose,  expand 
ing  ...  all  the  great  vivifying  eternal  face  of  hu 
manity,  had  burst  into  life  within  him. 

"  By  now  it  was  almost  day.  The  east  glowed 
opalescent  .  .  .  Overnight  something  had  occurred 
...  as  the  light  spread  he  looked  again  at  the  gi 
gantic  scroll  of  the  ranch  lands  unrolled  before  him 
from  edge  to  edge  of  the  horizon.  The  change  was 
not  fanciful;  the  change  was  real.  The  earth  was 
no  longer  bare,  the  land  was  no  longer  barren  —  no 
longer  empty,  no  longer  dull  brown.  All  at  once  An 
nixter  shouted  aloud. 

"  There  it  was  —  the  Wheat,  the  Wheat  ...  It 
was  there  before  him  everywhere — illimitable,  im 
measurable  .  .  .  Once  more  the  force  of  the  world 
was  revived.  Once  more  the  Titan,  benignant,  calm, 
stirred  and  woke,  and  the  morning  abruptly  blazed 
into  glory  upon  the  spectacle  of  a  man  whose  heart 


FRANK  NORRIS  161 

leaped  exuberant  with  the  love  of  a  woman,  and  an 
exulting  earth  gleaming  transcendent  with  the  radiant 
magnificence  of  an  inviolable  pledge." 

The  same  pledge  is  foreshadowed  and  finally  ful 
filled  in  the  experience  of  Vanamee,  whose  first  love 
died  sixteen  years  before  in  giving  birth  to  the  child 
of  another  man,  and  in  Padre  Sarcia's  quotation  from 
Paul's  epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  where  he  says : 
"  Thou  fool,  that  which  thou  sowest  is  not  quickened 
except  it  die.  ...  It  is  sown  a  natural  body;  it  is 
raised  a  spiritual  body." 

In  sharp  contrast  to  the  mysticism  of  Vanamee,  the 
man  of  the  deserts,  and  his  all-night  vigils  at  the 
cemetery  of  the  old  Mission,  close  to  the  flower  ranch 
where  the  girl  that  he  loved  had  lived,  we  have  the 
portrait  of  Lyman  Derrick  at  his  office  in  a  San 
Francisco  skyscraper,  at  the  moment  that  the  com 
mission's  official  railroad  map  of  California  for  the 
current  year  arrives. 

"  The  whole  map  was  gridironed  by  a  vast,  com 
plicated  net-work  of  red  lines  ...  a  veritable  sys 
tem  of  blood  circulation,  complicated,  dividing,  and 
reuniting  .  .  .  laying  hold  of  some  forgotten  village 
or  town,  involving  it  in  one  of  a  myriad  branching 
coils,  one  of  a  hundred  tentacles  .  .  . 

"  The  map  was  white,  and  it  seemed  as  if  all  the 
color  which  should  have  gone  to  vivify  the  various 
counties,  towns,  and  cities  marked  upon  it  had  been 
absorbed  by  that  huge,  sprawling  organism,  with  its 
ruddy  arteries  converging  to  a  central  point.  It 
was  as  though  the  State  had  been  sucked  white  and 
colorless ;  and  against  this  pallid  background  the  red 
arteries  of  the  monster  stood  out  swollen  with  life 


162     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

blood,  reaching  out  to  infinity,  gorged  to  bursting, 
—  an  excrescence,  a  gigantic  parasite  fattening  upon 
the  life  blood  of  an  entire  commonwealth." 

We  get  a  specific  instance  in  this  in  the  story  of 
Dyke.  Dyke  is  an  engineer.  He  quits  the  railroad, 
because  they  lower  his  salary  at  the  time  of  a  general 
cut  in  wages.  He  puts  all  his  savings  into  hop 
growing.  S.  Behrman  lends  him  money  on  mortgage. 
The  freight  rate  on  hops  is  low  at  the  time,  two 
cents  a  pound  in  car  load  lots.  After  his  crop  is 
contracted  for,  it  goes  up  to  five  cents.  Dyke  sees 
himself  ruined. 

"  And  this  was  but  one  instance,  an  isolated  case. 
Because  he  was  near  at  hand,  he  happened  to  see  it. 
How  many  others  were  there  the  length  and  breadth 
of  the  State?  Constantly  this  sort  of  thing  must 
occur  —  little  industries  choked  out  in  their  very  be 
ginnings,  the  air  full  of  the  death  rattles  of  little  en 
terprises,  expiring  unobserved  in  far  off  counties, 
up  in  canons  and  arroyos  of  the  foot  hills,  forgotten 
by  everyone  but  the  monster  who  was  daunted  by 
the  magnitude  of  no  business,  however  great ;  who 
overlooked  no  opportunity  of  plunder  however  petty, 
who  with  one  tentacle  grabbed  a  hundred  thousand 
acres  of  wheat,  and  with  another  pilfered  a  pocket 
ful  of  growing  hops." 

Dyke  demands  of  S.  Behrman  why  his  rate  was 
increased,  what  the  rule  is  if  there  is  any.  He  is  told 
that  the  railroad  charges  consistently  all  the  traffic 
will  stand.  He  goes  away  and  begins  to  drink. 
Later  he  holds  up  a  train  in  which  Annixter  and  his 
wife  are  making  their  bridal  journey  home  from  the 
city ;  and  his  subsequent  pursuit  and  capture  serve  to 


FRANK  NORRIS  163 

bring  the  story  along  thrillingly  one  step  nearer  to 
the  final  catastrophe. 

The  ranchers  form  a  league  of  six  hundred  mem 
bers  to  resist  the  railroad's  attempts  to  drive  them 
from  the  land  that  they  have  leased  and  improved. 
Magnus  Derrick  goes  to  San  Francisco.  He  talks 
with  one  of  the  largest  manufacturers  there  who  has 
himself  no  cause  to  love  the  railroad.  Cederquist 
suggests  that  the  ranchers'  trouble  is  not  unique. 

"  Every  State  has  its  own  grievance.  If  it  is  not  a 
railroad  trust,  it  is  a  sugar  trust,  or  an  oil  trust, 
or  an  industrial  trust,  that  exploits  the  People  be 
cause  the  People  allow  it.  The  indifference  of  the 
People  is  the  opportunity  of  the  despot.  .  .  .  The 
People  have  but  to  say  '  No,'  and  not  the  strong 
est  tyranny,  political,  religious,  or  financial  that  was 
ever  organized  could  survive  one  week." 

This  takes  place  at  one  of  the  leading  clubs  in  San 
Francisco  on  Ladies'  day.  A  picture  by  a  popular 
society  artist  is  to  be  raffled  off,  and  a  Million  Dollar 
Fair  is  to  be  subscribed  for. 

"  It  was  the  Fake,  the  eternal  irrepressible  Sham, 
glib,  nimble,  ubiquitous,  tricked  out  in  all  the  para 
phernalia  of  imposture  .  .  .  marshaled  by  '  lady 
presidents,'  exploited  by  clubs  of  women,  by  literary 
societies,  reading  circles  and  culture  organizations. 
The  attention  the  Fake  received,  the  time  devoted  to 
it,  the  money  which  it  absorbed  was  incredible.  It 
was  all  one  that  impostor  after  impostor  was  exposed, 
it  was  all  one  that  the  clubs,  or  circles,  the  societies 
were  proved  beyond  doubt  to  have  been  swindled 
.  .  .  the  women  rallied  to  the  defense  of  their 
protege  of  the  hour.  That  their  favorite  was  prose- 


164     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

cuted  was  to  them  a  veritable  rapture.  Promptly 
they  invested  the  apostle  of  culture  with  the  glamour 
of  a  martyr." 

There  is  talk  of  a  famine  in  India,  and  of  raising 
funds  to  send  a  relief  ship  to  the  sufferers.  Ceder- 
quist  has  his  own  plans  for  exporting  California 
wheat  to  the  Far  East.  He  believes  that  the  time 
for  an  American  commercial  invasion  of  the  Orient 
is  at  hand.  None  the  less,  he  has  his  doubts  of  its 
success ;  doubts  which  events  during  the  last  ten 
years  have  abundantly  justified.  He  sums  up  the 
situation  in  seven  words  as  he  leaves  the  club :  "  Not 
a  city,  Presley,  not  a  city,  but  a  Midway  Plaisance." 
Therein  San  Francisco  may  be  to  some  extent  excep 
tional  among  other  American  towns.  At  the  same 
time,  it  is  to  some  extent  typical. 

In  the  meantime  Vanamee  finds  Angele,  the  daugh 
ter  of  the  Angele  that  had  died.  He  sees  the  Wheat, 
too,  as  Annixter  had  seen  it  on  the  morning  of  its 
birth.  He  recognizes  definitely,  as  Annixter  failed 
to  do,  the  spiritual  truth  of  the  life  that  is  sown  in 
corruption  and  is  raised  in  incorruption,  that  is  sown 
in  weakness  and  is  raised  in  power.  Angele  was  not 
the  symbol  but  the  proof  of  immortality. 

Presley  goes  back  to  the  ranch  and  Annixter  for 
mulates  his  new  creed  for  his  friend. 

"  Pres,"  he  exclaimed,  "  she's  made  a  man  of  me ; 
I  was  a  machine  before,  and  if  another  man  or  woman 
or  child  got  in  my  way,  I  rode  'em  down,  and  I  never 
dreamed  of  anybody  else  but  myself.  But  as  soon  as 
I  woke  up  to  the  fact  that  I  really  loved  her,  why  it 
was  glory  hallelujah  all  in  a  minute,  and,  in  a  way, 
I  kind  of  loved  everybody  then,  and  wanted  to  be 


FRANK  NORRIS  165 

everybody's  friend.  And  I  began  to  see  that  a  fel 
low  can't  live  himself,  any  more  than  he  can  live  by 
himself.  He's  got  to  think  of  others.  If  he's  got 
brains,  he's  got  to  think  of  the  poor  devils  that 
haven't  them  ...  if  he's  got  money,  he's  got 
to  help  those  that  are  busted,  and  if  he's  got  a  house, 
he's  got  to  think  of  those  that  ain't  got  anywhere  to 
go. 

"  I've  got  a  whole  lot  of  ideas  since  I  began  to  love 
Hilma,  and  just  as  soon  as  I  can  I'm  going  to  get 
in  and  help  people,  and  I'm  going  to  keep  to  that 
idea  the  rest  of  my  natural  life.  That  ain't  much 
of  a  religion,  but  it's  the  best  that  I've  got,  and 
Henry  Ward  Beecher  couldn't  do  any  more  than 
that.  .  .  ." 

"  Beside  this  blundering  struggle  to  do  right,  to 
help  his  fellows,  Presley's  own  vague  schemes  of  glit 
tering  systems  of  reconstruction,  collapsed  to  ruin, 
and  he  himself,  with  all  his  refinement,  with  all  his 
poetry,  culture  and  education,  stood  a  bungler  at  the 
world's  work-bench." 

Annixter  has  already  given  a  home  to  Dyke's 
mother  and  his  little  daughter.  Dyke  is  given  a  life 
sentence  in  the  penitentiary,  and  in  the  meantime  the 
wheat  grows  ripe  for  the  harvest. 

The  people  gather  for  a  jack-rabbit  drive.  The 
description  of  this  and  of  the  barbecue  that  follows, 
like  that  of  the  dance  and  fight  in  Annixter's  barn, 
is  an  epic  in  brief. 

Word  comes  to  Magnus  Derrick  and  his  friends, 
while  they  are  still  at  the  barbecue,  that  the  railroad 
has  stolen  a  march  on  them,  that  S.  Behrman,  the 
United  States  Marshal  from  San  Francisco,  Delaney 


166     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  the  rest,  have  already  taken  possession  of  Annix- 
ter's  house  and  are  now  on  their  way  to  Los  Muer- 
tos. 

Magnus  and  his  party  can  only  muster  eleven  men. 
They  line  an  irrigation  ditch  on  the  road  to  the  ranch 
house  and  take  up  the  bridge  over  the  road.  They 
are  met  by  as  many  men  on  the  railroad's  side. 
Magnus  goes  forward  unarmed  to  parley,  part  of  his 
side  leave  cover  to  support  him,  the  first  shot  is  fired 
by  accident,  after  that  the  guns  seem  to  go  off  by 
themselves.  When  the  smoke  clears,  Harran  Der 
rick,  Annixter  and  three  other  ranchers  are  dead  and 
another  dying,  besides  Delaney  and  one  more  of  the 
railroad  men.  Active  hostilities  cease  then  and 
there.  The  dead  are  carried  back  to  Annixter's,  and 
the  country  roused.  The  United  States  marshal 
goes  back  to  San  Francisco  and  an  indignation  meet 
ing  of  the  whole  Ranchers'  League  gathers  in  the 
opera  house  of  the  nearest  town. 

Here  Presley,  who  has  become  an  Anarchist  for 
the  time  being,  speaks  in  the  midst  of  a  profound 
stillness. 

"  They  own  us,  these  taskmasters  of  ours,  they 
own  our  homes,  they  own  our  legislatures.  We  can 
not  escape  from  them;  there  is  no  redress.  We  are 
told  that  we  can  defeat  them  by  the  ballot-box.  They 
own  the  ballot-box.  We  are  told  that  we  must  look 
to  the  courts  for  redress.  They  own  the  courts. 
We  know  them  for  what  they  are  —  ruffians  in  poli 
tics,  ruffians  in  finance,  ruffians  in  law,  ruffians  in 
trade,  bribers,  swindlers  and  tricksters.  No  outrage 
too  great  to  daunt  them,  no  petty  larceny  too  small 
to  shame  them;  despoiling  a  government  treasury  of 


FRANK  NORRIS  167 

a  million  dollars,  jet  picking  the  pockets  of  a  farm 
hand  of  the  price  of  a  loaf  of  bread. 

"  They  swindle  a  nation  of  a  hundred  million  and 
call  it  Financiering ;  they  levy  a  blackmail  and  call  it 
Commerce ;  they  corrupt  a  legislature  and  call  it  Poli 
tics ;  they  bribe  a  judge  and  call  it  Law;  they  hire 
blacklegs  to  carry  out  their  plans  and  call  it  Organi 
zation  ;  they  prostitute  the  honor  of  a  State  and  call 
it  Competition. 

"  And  this  is  America !  " 

He  closes  with  an  appeal  to  the  Red  Terror.  A 
prolonged  explosion  of  applause  follows.  Presley 
quits  the  opera  house  weak  and  nerveless. 

Magnus  Derrick  rises  to  speak.  Men  in  the  gal 
lery  accuse  him  of  bribery.  He  attempts  to  answer 
them. 

Suddenly  the  house  is  literally  snowed  under  by 
copies  of  the  local  paper  whose  editor  has  black 
mailed  Derrick  and  then  sold  him  out,  containing  a 
full  account  of  the  work  of  the  League's  corruption 
fund,  which  has  been  up  to  this  time  secretly  admin 
istered  so  far  as  the  vast  majority  of  the  League  mem 
bers  is  concerned.  Derrick  quits  the  stage  in  the  con 
fusion.  Some  of  his  remaining  friends  follow  him 
and  urge  him  to  give  the  lie  to  his  accusers.  The 
house  is  shouting  for  him.  In  the  soubrette's  dress 
ing-room,  in  air  heavy  with  the  smell  of  sachet  pow 
der  and  stale  grease  paint,  he  is  forced  to  confess  that 
he  cannot. 

That  night  Presley  throws  a  bomb  into  S.  Behr- 
man's  house.  The  house  is  wrecked,  but  the  man  is 
uninjured.  Presley  escapes  undetected  and  goes  back 
to  San  Francisco, 


168     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

The  widow  of  one  of  the  dispossessed  ranchers  and 
her  two  daughters  also  come  there.  They  have 
neither  friends  nor  money.  The  mother  dies  in  the 
street  of  hunger  and  exhaustion  the  night  of  a  din 
ner  party  at  which  Presley  is  told  that  his  poem, 
The  Toilers,  has  started  the  movement  to  send 
the  relief  ship  to  the  famine  sufferers  in  India.  Be 
fore  this  he  has  met  and  recognized  the  widow's  elder 
daughter,  who  has  already  become  a  prostitute. 

Presley  manages  to  interview  Shelgrim,  the  presi 
dent  of  the  railroad,  in  the  latter's  office. 

"  Believe  this,  young  man,"  exclaimed  Shelgrim 
..."  try  to  believe  this  —  to  begin  with  —  that 
Railroads  build  themselves.  Where  there  is  a  de 
mand,  sooner  or  later  there  will  be  a  supply.  Mr. 
Derrick,  does  he  grow  his  wheat?  Wheat  grows  it 
self.  What  does  he  count  for !  Does  he  supply  the 
force?  What  do  I  count  for?  Do  I  build  the  rail 
road?  You  are  dealing  with  forces,  young  man,  when 
you  speak  of  Wheat  and  the  Railroads,  not  with  men. 
There  is  the  Wheat,  the  supply.  It  must  be  carried 
to  feed  the  people.  There  is  the  demand.  The 
Wheat  is  one  force,  the  Railroad  another,  and  there 
is  the  law  that  governs  them  —  supply  and  demand. 
Men  have  little  to  do  in  the  whole  business.  Compli 
cations  may  arise,  conditions  that  bear  hard  on  the 
individual  —  crush  him,  may  be  —  but  the  Wheat  will 
be  carried  to  feed  the  people  as  inevitably  as  it  will 
grow.  If  you  want  to  fasten  the  blame  of  the  affair 
at  Los  Muertos  on  any  one  person,  you  will  make  a 
mistake.  Blame  conditions,  not  men." 

Presley  interposes  an  objection.  Shelgrim  cuts 
him  short:  "  Control  the  road!  Can  I  stop  it?  I 


FRANK  NORRIS  169 

can  go  into  bankruptcy,  if  you  like.  But  otherwise, 
if  I  run  my  road  as  a  business  proposition,  I  can  do 
nothing.  I  can  not  control  it.  It  is  a  force  born  out 
of  certain  conditions,  and  I  —  no  man  —  can  stop  it 
or  control  it.  Can  your  Mr.  Derrick  stop  the  Wheat 
growing?  He  can  burn  his  crop  or  he  can  give  it 
away,  or  sell  it  for  a  cent  a  bushel  —  just  as  I  could 
go  into  bankruptcy  —  but  otherwise  his  Wheat  must 
grow.  Can  any  one  stop  the  Wheat?  Well  then, 
no  more  can  I  stop  the  Road." 

Presley  is  not  a  specialist  in  railroad  economics. 
He  goes  away  dazed  and  overpowered ;  unable  to  dis 
criminate  between  the  essential  truth  of  this  state 
ment  in  the  main  and  its  fallacy  in  detail. 

He  takes  passage  on  the  ship  SwanTulda,  which 
Cederquist  is  sending  to  India  loaded  with  wheat.  He 
goes  back  to  Los  Muertos  to  say  good-by  to  the  Der 
ricks,  Hilma  Annixter  and  Vanamee.  He  finds  Mag 
nus  Derrick  broken  and  half  imbecile,  packing  up  and 
about  to  leave.  S.  Behrman  comes  to  take  possession 
of  the  ranch  house  before  he  leaves.  In  Presley's 
presence  he  offers  Derrick  a  job  as  a  clerk  at  fifty 
dollars  a  month  in  the  local  freight  manager's  office. 
He  warns  Magnus  that  he  will  have  to  turn  "  Rail 
road,"  that  he  will  have  to  take  orders  from  him. 
Magnus  accepts  and  Presley  goes  away. 

S.  Behrman  gets  the  contract  for  filling  the  Swan- 
hilda  with  wheat.  He  goes  to  the  ship  to  see  how 
the  work  is  progressing.  He  stands  over  the  hatch 
by  the  chute  that  connects  with  the  elevator.  He 
trips  over  a  rope  and  falls  inside.  No  one  notices 
him  or  hears  his  cries.  He  is  buried  in  the  wheat. 
This  episode,  his  dance  of  death,  that  covers  four 


170     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

pages,  is  too  long  to  be  quoted  complete.  Partial 
quotation  cannot  do  it  justice.  As  one  reads  it,  it 
seems  as  inevitable  as  the  rest  of  the  book,  as  Mrs. 
Hooven's  progress  with  her  baby  through  poverty 
and  the  streets  of  San  Francisco  to  death. 

"  Ah,  that  via  dolorosa  of  the  destitute,  that  chemin 
de  croix  of  the  homeless !  Ah,  that  mile  after  mile 
of  granite  pavement  that  must  be  traversed.  Walk 
they  must.  Move  they  must ;  onward,  forward, 
whither  they  cannot  tell,  why  they  do  not  know.  .  .  . 
Death  is  at  the  end  of  that  devious,  winding 
maze  of  paths  crossed  and  recrossed  and  crossed 
again.  There  is  but  one  goal  to  the  via  dolorosa; 
there  is  no  escape  from  the  central  chamber  of 
that  labyrinth.  Fate  guides  the  feet  of  them  that 
are  set  therein.  Double  on  their  steps  though  they 
may,  weave  in  and  out  of  the  myriad  corners  of  the 
city's  streets,  return,  go  forward,  back,  from  side  to 
side,  here,  there,  anywhere,  dodge,  twist,  wind,  the 
central  chamber  where  Death  sits  is  reached  inexora 
bly  at  the  end." 

And  the  reason  and  the  purpose  of  it  all  is  found 
in  the  author's  own  summary  on  the  last  two  pages 
of  the  book. 

"  Yes,  the  Railroad  had  prevailed.  The  ranches 
had  been  seized  in  the  tentacles  of  the  Octopus;  the 
iniquitous  burden  of  extortionate  freight  rates  had 
been  imposed  like  a  yoke  of  iron. 

"  The  monster  had  killed.  ...  It  had  slain  An- 
nixter  at  the  very  moment  when  painfully  and  man 
fully  he  had  at  last  achieved  his  own  salvation  and 
had  stood  forth  resolved  to  do  right,  to  act  unself 
ishly,  and  to  live  for  others.  It  had  widowed  Hilma 


FRANK  NORRIS  171 

in  the  very  dawn  of  her  happiness.  It  had  killed 
the  very  babe  within  the  mother's  womb,  strangling 
life  ere  yet  it  had  been  born,  stamping  out  the  spark 
ordained  by  God  to  burn  through  all  eternity. 

"  What  then  wras  left  ?  .  .  .  suddenly  Vanamee's 
words  came  back  to  his  mind.  What  was  the  larger 
view,  what  contributed  the  greatest  good  to  the  great 
est  number?  What  was  the  full  round  of  the  circle 
whose  segment  only  he  beheld  !  In  the  end  .  .  .  good 
issued  from  this  crisis,  untouched,  unassailable,  un- 
defiled. 

"  Men  —  motes  in  the  sunshine  —  perished.  .  .  . 
But  the  WHEAT  remained.  .  .  .  Through  the  wel 
ter  of  blood  at  the  irrigation  ditch,  through  the  sham 
charity  and  shallow  philanthropy  of  famine  relief 
committees,  the  great  harvest  of  Los  Muertos  rolled 
like  a  flood  from  the  Sierras  to  the  Himalayas  to  feed 
thousands  of  starving  scarecrows  in  the  barren  plains 
of  India. 

"Falseness  dies;  injustice  and  oppression  in  the 
end  of  everything  fade  and  vanish  away.  Greed, 
cruelty,  selfishness  and  humanity  are  short-lived ;  the 
individual  suffers  but  the  race  goes  on.  Annixter 
dies,  but  in  a  far  distant  corner  of  the  world  a  thou 
sand  lives  are  saved.  The  larger  view  always  and 
through  all  shams  and  wickedness,  discovers  the  Truth 
that  will,  in  the  end,  prevail,  and  all  things  surely, 
inevitably,  resistlessly,  work  together  for  good." 

Concerning  McTeague  and  The  Octopus, 
Mr.  Howells  writes  in  The  North  American  Review 
for  December,  1902 :  "  McTeague  was  a  personal 
epic,  the  Odyssey  of  a  simple  semi-savage  nature  ad 
venturing  and  experiencing  along  the  social  levels 


172  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

which  the  story  kept.  ...  I  wish  now  to  affirm  .  .  . 
to  testify  to  the  value  which  this  extraordinary  book 
has  from  its  perfect  simple  fidelity,  from  the  truth 
fulness  in  which  there  is  no  self-doubt  and  no  self- 
excuses. 

"  But  with  all  its  power  McTeague  is  no  such 
book  as  The  Octopus,  which  is  as  the  Iliad  to  its 
Odyssey. 

"  It  will  not  be  suggesting  too  much  for  the  story 
to  say  that  there  is  a  kind  of  Homeric  largeness  in 
the  play  of  the  passions  moving  it.  They  are  not  au 
tochthons  these  Californians  of  the  great  Wheat 
farms,  choking  in  the  folds  of  the  Railroad,  but  Amer 
icans  of  more  than  one  transplantation ;  yet  there  is 
something  rankly  earthy  and  elemental  in  them  which 
gives  them  the  pathos  of  tormented  Titans.  The 
story  is  not  less  but  more  epical  in  being  a  strongly 
interwrought  group  of  episodes. 

"  The  play  of  an  imagination  fed  by  a  rich  con 
sciousness  of  the  mystical  relations  of  nature  and  hu 
man  nature,  the  body  and  soul  of  earthly  life,  steeps 
the  whole  theme  in  an  odor  of  common  growth.  It  is 
as  if  the  Wheat  sprang  out  of  the  hearts  of  men  in 
the  conception  of  the  young  poet  who  writes  its 
Iliad,  and  who  shows  how  it  overwhelms  their  lives 
and  germinates  anew  from  their  depths.  His  poem 
of  which  the  terms  are  naked  prose,  is  a  picture  of 
the  civilization,  the  society,  the  culture,  the  agricul 
tural  California  which  is  the  ground  of  his  work.  It 
will  be  easily  believed  that  in  the  handling  nothing  es 
sential  to  the  strong  impression  is  blinked ;  but  noth 
ing,  on  the  other  hand,  is  forced. 

"  As  I  write  and  scarcely  touch  the  living  allegory 


FRANK  NORRIS  173 

here  and  there,  it  rises  before  me  in  its  large  inclu 
sion,  .  .  .  the  breadth,  and  the  fineness,  the  beauty 
and  the  dread,  the  baseness  and  the  grandeur,  the 
sensuality  and  the  spirituality,  working  together  for 
the  effect  of  a  novel  unequaled  for  scope  and  for 
grasp  in  our  fiction." 

In  The  Pit  (1903),  the  second  volume  of  the  un 
finished  trilogy,  we  have  the  story  of  Curtis  Jadwin, 
who  tries  to  corner  wheat,  and  who  succeeds  for  a 
time,  till  the  demand  that  supply  invariably  breeds, 
and  the  growth  of  the  wheat  itself,  break  him. 
After  his  failure  he  goes  back  to  the  country  and 
begins  life  over  again.  He  wins  back  his  wife,  who 
has  married  him  more  for  his  money  than  himself,  and 
in  the  end  he  is  a  better  man  than  before.  Jadwin 
himself  and  Page  Deanborn,  his  wife's  sister,  another 
man's  woman  of  the  type  that  Norris,  like  Mark 
Twain,  liked  and  understood,  are  done  excellently; 
and  with  the  Cresslers,  Landry  Court,  Gretry  and 
Mrs.  Wessels,  Page's  aunt,  they  represent  a  part  of 
the  actual  life  of  Chicago  to-day  that  any  American 
who  has  lived  in  Chicago  six  months  cannot  fail  to 
recognize. 

With  Laura  Jadwin  and  Sheldon  Corthell,  the  art-       ^, 
ist  who  is  in  love  with  her,  the  author  has  less  sym-  t 
pathy  and  less  success. 

The  technical  side  of  the  making  and  breaking  of 
the  wheat  corner,  the  whole  atmosphere  and  move 
ment  of  the  Chicago  stock  exchange,  is  presented 
with  an  admirable  clearness  and  an  intensity  of  in 
terest  that  has  never  been  equaled  in  fiction  here  or 
abroad.  Beside  this  phase  of  The  Pit,  Zola's 


174     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

L 'Argent  and  minor  American  novelizations   of  the 
workings  of  Wall  Street  are  inconsiderable. 

At  the  same  time,  The  Pit  must  be  reckoned  as 
a  comparative  failure.  By  itself,  if  published  before 
The  Octopus,  it  might  or  might  not  have  attracted 
notice  as  an  unusual  book  and  a  remarkably  effective 
handling,  with  realism  within  its  province.  Pub 
lished,  as  it  was,  in  the  natural  order  of  the  trilogy,  it 
is  completely  overshadowed  by  The  Octopus,  as  any 
story  of  mere  traders  and  trading  must  remain  in 
ferior  to  an  epic  that  deals  adequately  with  cosmic 
forces ;  and  it  serves  its  purpose  chiefly  as  a  connect 
ing  link  between  the  actuality  of  what  Norris  lived 
to  accomplish,  and  the  vision  of  what  he  was  not  des 
tined  to  do. 

There  is  no  great  loss  without  some  small  gain.  The 
comparatively  restricted  interest  among  Frank  Nor- 
ris's  own  countrymen  in  his  life  and  work  up-to-date 
has  spared  the  world  much  of  the  literary  post-mor 
tem  gossip,  private  letters  and  other  material  imma 
ture  and  insignificant,  in  one  way  or  another  unfit 
for  publication,  which  morbid  curiosity  and  commer 
cialized  journalists  and  publishers  combine  to  inflict 
on  long  suffering  humanity. 

A  Deal  in  Wheat  (Doubleday  Page  &  Company, 
1909),  The  Third  Circle  (John  Lane  Company, 
1909),  in  which  the  title  story  and  "  A  Caged  Lion  " 
are  especially  notable,  "  Yvernelle "  a  narrative 
poem  in  three  cantos  (Lippincott's,  1892),  "  The 
Joyous  Miracle  (Doubleday  Page  &  Company, 
1906)  are  all  that  the  family  and  the  friends  of 
Norris  permitted  us  to  see  until  the  publication  of 
"  Vandover  and  the  Brute  "  in  the  Spring  of  1914. 


FRANK  NORRIS  175 

Concerning  this  novel,  written  in  1895  at  Harvard 
while  "  McTeague  "  was  still  under  way,  similar  to 
the  latter  in  general  tenor  and  method,  almost  equally 
strong  in  remorseless  realism  in  spots,  suffering  in 
many  places  from  the  lack  of  revision  that  the  bet 
ter  known  book  received ;  concerning  its  romantic  his 
tory  ;  its  supposed  loss  in  the  San  Francisco  earth 
quake  and  fire,  its  recent  discovery  and  final  identi 
fication,  Charles  G.  Norris,  the  novelist's  brother, 
has  told  us  all  that  is  essential  and  much  besides  in 
the  preface  to  the  book  and  in  a  biographical  pam 
phlet  published  at  the  same  time  by  Doubleday  Page 
&Co. 

From  these  sources  those  interested  in  Norris  as 
man  as  well  as  artist,  may  learn  much  about  his  per 
sonal  qualities,  his  manner  of  work,  his  intense  pre 
occupation  with  reality  and  its  adequate  interpreta 
tion  in  the  modern  novel,  that  has  hitherto  been  de 
nied  them.  Any  careful  reading  of  these  two  foot 
notes  to  this  author's  life  will  go  far  to  confirm  the 
impression  that  among  the  mob  of  modern  writ 
ers  of  American  fiction  who  are  frankly  out  for  quick 
profits  and  small  returns  in  the  literary  sense,  and 
beside  the  inner  circle  of  novelists  of  culture  that 
prides  itself  on  its  barren  exclusiveness  and  false  pre 
tense,  Frank  Norris  stands,  in  this  new  century  of 
American  literature,  so  far  unrivaled,  unassailed  and 
unassailable. 

His  ideals  and  his  power,  his  broad  and  deep  hu 
manity,  his  intimate  and  specialized  acquaintance  with 
life  and  its  meaning  in  America  to-day,  are  set  forth 
unmistakably  in  The  Responsibilities  of  the  Novel 
ist  and  The  Octopus.  The  world  has  achieved  few 


176     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

or  no  works  of  literature  in  the  first  decade  of  the 
twentieth  century  of  its  Christian  era  that  it  can  less 
afford  to  spare.  In  the  recent  history  of  American 
art  and  letters,  America  and  the  world  has  lost  much 
in  the  comparatively  early  deaths  and  unfinished 
careers  of  Wolcott  Balestier,  Stephen  Crane,  Harold 
Frederic  and  David  Graham  Phillips.  The  same  may 
be  said  of  Frank  Norris  without  reserve  and  with 
even  greater  regret. 

Summarized  briefly  from  a  two-inch  article  in  a  con 
temporary  encyclopaedia,  we  learn  that  Benjamin 
Franklin  Norris  was  born  in  1870  and  died  in  1902, 
that  he  studied  art  at  Paris  in  1887-89,  that  he  was 
a  student  in  literary  courses  at  the  University  of 
California  and  at  Harvard,  that  he  was  a  correspond 
ent  of  the  San  Francisco  Chronicle  in  South  Africa 
at  the  time  of  the  Jameson  raid,  that  later  he  was  a 
war  correspondent  in  Cuba,  and  that  he  was  the  liter 
ary  adviser  of  a  New  York  publishing  house  at  the 
time  of  his  death. 

It  is  evident  from  the  mere  summary  of  this  brief 
and  stirring  career,  from  the  accounts  of  the  few  who 
were  privileged  to  know  him  personally,  and  from  the 
literary  work  that  he  had  already  achieved  at  the  time 
of  his  death,  at  the  age  of  thirty-two,  that  the  making 
of  a  master  in  world-fiction  was  here.  That  he  did 
achieve  one  masterpiece  is  unquestionable.  That  he 
was  in  the  very  flood-tide  of  his  powers  when  he  died, 
that  he  had  fitted  himself  into  the  environment  best 
suited  for  the  further  development  of  his  talents, 
seems  equally  beyond  dispute. 

That  he  stands  as  he  is,  a  personality  in  American 


FRANK  NORRIS  177 

literature  only  comparable  with  Walt  Whitman  and 
Mark  Twain,  will  be  freely  debated.  Time  will  tell. 
It  is  only  ten  years  since  his  death,  and  even  in 
France,  that  home  of  Latin  lucidity  and  startling 
frankness  of  artistic  expression,  an  equal  lapse  of 
time,  or  longer,  is  required  to  admit  a  dead  painter  or 
sculptor  to  the  comparative  immortality  of  the 
Louvre. 

One  thing  about  Norris  is  unmistakable.  In  his 
hatred  of  sham,  of  pretense,  of  special  privilege  of 
any  sort,  he  is  fully  as  democratic,  as  sincere,  as 
American,  as  Mark  Twain.  At  the  same  time,  his 
hatred  is  less  partisan,  less  prejudiced,  less  handi 
capped  by  the  bitterness  that  clouded  the  latter  days 
of  the  great  humorist.  Norris,  as  one  reads  him, 
seems  almost  absolutely  devoid  of  the  sense  of  humor, 
but  his  interest  in  life  and  his  sense  of  proportion  are 
so  vast,  so  comprehensive,  so  intense,  so  true  that  one 
reads  him  without  missing  this.  For  it  is  the  prov 
ince  and  the  essence  of  the  humorist  to  express  con 
trasts  ;  of  the  master  novelist  to  harmonize  and  in 
terpret  the  law  that  lies  beneath  them. 

One  feels  instinctively,  as  one  reasons  with  the  full 
possession  of  one's  reasoning  powers,  that  Norris  sees 
life  quite  as  clearly  as  Mark  Twain  does:  clearer  in 
the  mass  and  as  uncompromisingly  in  all  essentials ; 
in  the  aggregate  more  fully  and  progressively,  as  he 
is  himself  the  product  of  a  later  generation  and  of 
conditions  equally  characteristic  of  the  American  at 
his  best. 

As  a  product  of  more  modern  and,  in  many  ways, 
more  reactionary  conditions,  and  as  a  progressive 


178     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

optimist  to  his  last  day  and  hour,  Frank  Norris  de 
serves  to  be  ranked  slightly  higher  in  the  human 
scale  than  Mark  Twain ;  and  it  is  quite  possible  that 
in  the  long  run  his  work  will  be  remembered  longer. 


DAVID   GRAHAM   PHILLIPS  AND   RESULTS 

"The  literature  of  a  people  should  be  the  record  of  its 
joys  and  its  sorrows,  its  aspirations  and  its  shortcomings,  its 
wisdom  and  its  folly,  the  confidence  of  its  soul.  We  can 
not  say  that  our  own  as  yet  suffices  us,  but  I  believe  that  he 
who  stands  a  hundred  years  hence  where  I  am  standing  now, 
conscious  that  he  speaks  to  the  most  powerful  and  prosperous 
community  ever  devised,  or  developed  by  man,  will  speak  of 
our  literature  with  the  assurance  of  one  who  beholds  what 
we  hope  for  «nd  aspire  after,  become  a  reality  and  a  possession 
forever."  James  Russell  Lowell,  1889. 

"The  institutions  of  society  are  to  be  judged  by  their  fit 
ness  to  place  the  right  men  in  the  right  places."  Joseph  Jas- 
trow,  Qualities  of  Men,  1910. 

NOT  only  the  right  men  but  the  right  women. 
Judged  by  this  criticism,  Society  in  America,  as  it 
differentiates  itself  by  the  capitalized  first  letter  to 
day,  is  the  most  extravagant  in  money  and  material ; 
the  most  pretentious,  the  most  vulgar,  the  most  inef 
ficient ;  the  least  inspired  and  inspiring;  the  most 
brainless,  the  least  fit;  the  most  barbaric,  the  most 
tragi-comic  failure  of  twenty  centuries  of  civiliza 
tion. 

Europe  has  realized  this  for  years. 

And  the  brains  and  energies  that  have  made  and 
advertised  America  during  the  last  half-century  are 
gradually  waking  up  to  the  facts  which  The  Hus 
band's  Story  sets  forth  comprehensively.  They 

begin  to  realize  that  competition  in  clothes  and  social 

179 


180     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

display  is  at  present  a  national  liability,  not  a  na 
tional  asset ;  and  that  whatever  may  or  may  not  have 
been  expedient  in  the  past,  to-day  national  sandwich 
women  and  multi-millionairesses,  whose  personal  ex 
penditures  exceed  from  fifty  to  one  hundred  thousand 
dollars  yearly,  are  not  needed  in  our  present  line  of 
business. 

It  is  significant  that  in  the  year  of  this  present 
writing,  the  story  of  the  passing  of  the  idle  rich  has 
been  told  by  a  man  from  their  own  ranks.  It  is  an 
admitted  fact  that  of  the  idle  rich  and  near-rich  in 
America,  fully  nine-tenths  are  women,  many  of  them 
with  fathers  or  husbands  risen  from  the  ranks.  It  is 
still  more  significant  that,  among  the  mob  of  more 
than  five  thousand  women  writers  of  some  note  in 
America  to-day,  not  one  has  seen  fit  to  enlarge 
upon  this  state  of  affairs  successfully;  and  that 
it  has  been  left  to  a  novelist  like  David  Graham  Phil 
lips  to  demonstrate  conclusively  the  spiritual  and 
mental  poverty  of  the  women  of  our  conventional  up 
per  class,  and  to  make  both  money  and  a  lasting 
reputation  through  the  most  unmistakable  and  un 
compromising  handling  of  this  phase  of  our  national 
life. 

There  is  very  little  evidence  that  Mr.  Phillips  be 
gan  of  set  purpose  to  specialize  on  this  theme.  The 
conviction  has  been  gradually  forced  on  him,  as  it  has 
been  forced  on  the  majority  of  his  male  contempo 
raries.  He  has  been  one  of  the  few  strong  men  in 
American  fiction  who  have  consistently  had  the  cour- 
.  age  of  their  convictions  and  the  fitness  to  make  these 
convictions  carry  through.  He  has  at  one  time  or 
another  attacked  and  exposed  successfully  other 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  181 

special  interests  that  the  American  people  as  a  whole 
feel  least  proud  of  to-day.  It  was  left  for  him,  in  two 
of  his  most  notable  and  most  mature  novels,  Old  Wires 
for  New  and  The  Husband's  Story,  to  settle  once 
and  for  all  the  pretensions  of  American  femininity 
"  higher  up  "  to  the  unearned  increments  of  sweetness 
and  light,  and  the  fine  flowering  into  nothing  of  the 
culture,  which  he  has  stigmatized  as  that  of  a  fog 
bank. 

Few  will  be  found  to  dispute  the  fact  that  Mr. 
Phillips  has  been,  from  first  to  last,  consistently  a 
radical  in  politics,  in  journalism  and  in  literature. 
Like  all  successful  radicals,  he  struck  at  the  roots  of 
things,  he  hewed  to  the  lines,  he  never  ceased  to  strike 
till  his  axe  went  to  the  mark  and  stayed  there. 

In  spite  of  his  early  and  tragic  taking  off,  he  at 
tained  success  in  his  main  line  of  attack,  he  made  an 
indelible  impression  on  the  minds  and  hearts  of  his 
country  men  and  country  women  while  he  was  still  a 
comparatively  young  man.  The  very  suddenness  and 
spectacular  nature  of  his  death  deepened  and  fixed 
this  impression  while  it  was  still  in  the  fixative  state. 
His  loss  remains  the  nation's  gain.  The  negative 
suspensions  of  indifference  and  reaction  towards  the 
issues  raised  by  him  have  been  in  innumerable  cases 
developed  into  a  positive  appreciation  of  the  man's  sin 
cerity  and  strength.  In  the  racial  advertising  pro 
gramme  and  cosmic  scheme  of  things,  the  account  has 
been  already  balanced ;  the  picture  of  the  Truth  as  he 
saw  it  and  set  it  forth  has  been  already,  in  less  than 
two  years,  permanently  developed  and  enlarged  in 
the  gallery  of  our  national  literary  and  tempera 
mental  types. 


182     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

It  is  proper  to  speak  of  Mr.  Phillips  in  the  terms 
of  photography.  His  likenesses  were  so  life-like  that 
there  was  no  getting  by  them.  His  art  was  no  more 
that  of  either  the  miniaturist  or  the  pastellist,  than 
it  was  that  of  the  genre  or  mural  painter  of  classic 
tradition.  He  dealt  in  essentials,  not  nuances;  in 
facts,  not  conventions.  At  times  he  transcended  the 
range  of  the  ordinary  social  camera  of  fiction  and 
achieved  the  very  X-ray  of  photography  of  the 
American  mind  and  soul  of  to-day.  Like  the  big 
business  men  who  are  his  strongest  male  characters 
and  most  successful  masculine  portraits,  he  was  out 
for  results,  and  he  got  them. 

Never  in  the  history  of  fiction  had  there  been  a 
scries  of  books  —  literary  in  the  sense  that  much  of 
the  most  virile  parts  of  the  Bible,  Shakespeare  and 
Ibsen  are  literary ;  popular  and  sui  generis  as  a  great 
modern  railroad  bridge  or  a  skyscraper  are  popular 
and  unmistakably  distinguished  —  containing  so 
many  paragraphs,  so  many  pages,  of  unmistakable 
truth,  truth  that  hits  one  between  the  eyes,  and  makes 
one  say,  "  I  always  knew  that  "  or  "  Why  didn't  I 
ever  see  that  before  ?  "  as  Mr.  Phillips  achieved  at  the 
height  of  his  powers,  in  half  a  dozen  of  the  more 
notable  and  readable  novels. 

It  was  stated  at  the  time  of  his  death  that  he  had 
decided  to  shift  his  attack  from  fiction  to  the  stage. 
If  The  Worth  of  a  Woman,  which  was  produced 
at  the  Madison  Square  Theater,  New  York,  in  Febru 
ary,  1908,  is  any  criterion,  there  is  little  doubt  that 
before  long  he  would  have  won  the  same  success  in 
the  new  field  as  in  the  old. 

The  time  was  ripe  for  it  just  as  it  was  ripe  for  the 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  183 

extension  of  Colonel  Roosevelt's  policies  during  the 
seven  years  that  our  greatest  living  ex-president  held 
the  center  of  our  political  stage.     Phillips  may  justly   1 
be  called  the  Roosevelt  of  American  literature. 

Both  have,  at  their  best,  been  the  product  of  a  will 
power  and  an  energy  specialized  to  the  limit  by  the 
individual,  and  reenforced  consciously  or  insensibly 
by  the  unparalleled  intensity  of  the  American  char 
acter  and  the  American  social  and  political  conditions 
that  have  made  themselves  heard  and  felt  through 
them.  Both  have  been  characteristic  products  of 
American  environment.  Both  have  as  characteris 
tically  reacted  on  the  environment  that  produced  < 
them. 

Phillips,  like  Mark  Twain,  Howells,  Frank  Norris, 
Harold  Frederic  and  Stephen  Crane,  was  in  the  be 
ginning  a  newspaper  man.  Like  the  first  three,  he 
was  born  in  or  near  the  middle  West. 

He  came  to  New  York  in  1896  from  Princeton,  the 
most  democratic  of  our  typical  Eastern  Universities, 
with  a  point  of  view  differing  little  in  essentials  from 
that  expressed  in  1905  in  The  Reign  of  Gilt. 

It  may  be  news  to  many  that  this  book  is  not  a 
novel.  It  is  a  brief  and  comprehensive  statement  of 
his  social  and  political  creed,  and  the  evolutionary 
reasons  on  which  he  bases  it.  It  is  as  unsparing  in 
its  denunciations  of  the  things  he  sees  fit  to  denounce 
as  any  of  his  later  or  earlier  books ;  at  the  same  time, 
like  the  rest  of  them,  it  is  constructively  and  inspir- 
ingly  optimistic. 

It  tells  us :  "  It  is  as  exact  a  truth  as  any  in  chem 
istry  or  mechanics  that  Aristocracy  is  the  natural, 
the  inevitable  sequence  of  widespread  ignorance,  and 


184     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Democracy  the  natural,  the  inevitable,  sequence  of 
widespread  intelligence.  .  .  .  New  conditions  may 
produce  new  and  subtle  tyrannies  that  seem  stronger 
than  the  old.  All  in  vain.  As  well  might  a  con 
course  of  parliaments  and  tongues  resolve  that  the 
heat  of  the  sun  be  reduced  one-half.  .  .  .  The  story 
of  history,  rightly  written,  would  be  the  story  of  the 
march  of  Democracy,  now  patiently  wearing  away 
obstacles,  accelerated  there,  now  sweeping  along  upon 
the  surface,  again  flowing  for  centuries  underground, 
but  always  in  action,  always  the  one  continuous,  inevi 
table  force.  There  has  never  been  any  more  danger 
of  its  defeat  than  there  has  been  danger  that  the  hu 
man  brain  would  be  smoothed  of  its  thought-bearing 
convolutions  and  set  in  retreat  through  the  stages  of 
evolution  back  to  protoplasm. 

"  Because  of  these  spectacles  of  sloth,  incompetence 
and  corruption  in  public  officials,  it  is  charged  by 
many  persons  of  reputation  as  '  publicists  '  that  De 
mocracy  is  a  breeder  of  public  corruption !  The  truth 
is  just  the  reverse.  Democracy  drags  public  corrup 
tion  out  of  its  mole  tunnels  where  it  undermines  so 
ciety,  drags  it  into  the  full  light  of  day.  .  .  .  The 
truth  is,  steam  and  electricity  have  made  the  human 
race  suddenly  and  acutely  self-conscious  as  a  race  for 
the  first  time  of  its  existence.  They  have  constructed' 
a  mighty  mirror  wherein  humanity  sees  itself,  with 
all  its  faults  and  follies  and  diseases  and  deformities. 
And  the  sudden,  unprecedented  spectacle  is  so  start 
ling,  is  in  such  abhorrent  contrast  with  poetical  pic 
tures  of  the  past,  painted  in  school  and  popular  text 
books,  that  men  of  defective  perspective  shrink  and 
shriek :  '  Man  has  become  monstrous  ! '  But  not  so, 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  185 

Man,  rising,  rising,  rising  through  the  ages,  is  not 
nearer  to  the  dark  and  bloody  and  cruel  place  of  his 
origin  than  to  the  promised  land  toward  which  his 
ideals  are  drawing  him.  .  .  . 

"  What  our  grandfathers  regarded  as  the  natural 
and  just  demands  of  employers  upon  employe  are  now 
regarded  as  rigorous  and  tyrannous  exactions  of  a 
brute.  .  .  .  False  weights  were  found  in  the  ruins  of 
the  oldest  city  that  has  been  exhumed.  ...  It  is  no 
new  thing  for  a  man  to  be  admired  and  envied  for 
wealth  and  station,  regardless  of  how  he  got  them. 
But  it  is  a  new  thing  in  the  world  for  the  public  con 
science  to  be  so  sensitive  that  a  man  in  possession  of 
wealth  and  station,  got  not  by  open  and  outright  rob 
bery  —  methods  not  long  ago  regarded  without  grave 
disapproval  —  but  by  means  that  are  questionable 
and  suspicious  merely,  should  be  in  an  apologetic  atti 
tude,  should  feel  called  upon  to  defend  himself,  and 
to  give  large  sums  in  philanthropy  in  the  effort  to 
justify  and  rehabilitate  himself.  .  .  . 

"  And  more  than  ninety  per  cent,  of  our  business 
is  done  upon  credit.  Under  the  old  order  the  very 
laws  and  customs,  the  very  morality  taught  by  the 
church  was  grounded  upon  the  justice  of  the  unjust 
distribution  of  the  products  of  labor ;  under  the  new 
regime,  under  business  enterprise,  law  and  custom 
and  religion  teach  only  value  for  value  received." 

Mr.  Phillips  believed  in  value  received,  and  prac 
ticed  what  he  preached  in  literature  as  well  as  in 
journalism  and  other  walks  of  life. 

He  left  the  New  York  Sun  after  he  had  made  good 
on  it  as  a  reporter ;  he  was  made  London  correspond 
ent  for  The  World,  and  later  became  an  editorial 


186     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

writer  for  the  same  paper,  before  he  began  to  devote 
himself  exclusively  to  muck-raking  magazine  articles 
and  to  fiction. 

In  literature,  as  in  journalism,  he  was  out  for  re 
sults  from  start  to  finish,  and  he  invariably  got  them. 
His  native  dramatic  sense  and  his  newspaper  training 
taught  him  to  specialize  in  stories  of  strong  human 
interest,  told  in  the  kind  of  English  that  appeals 
lastingly  to  the  better  sort  of  newspaper  readers  in 
every  large  American  city.  In  the  course  of  time, 
from  the  plainest  kind  of  statement  of  the  plainest 
kind  of  facts,  he  evolved  a  technique  that  began  to  be 
big  enough  for  his  own  art  and  the  problems  he  han 
dled;  his  last  and  best  books  are  not  only  admirable 
examples  of  the  art  that  conceals  art,  but  they  are 
veritable  advances  in  the  progress  of  constructive 
fiction,  evolved  and  adapted  to  meet  the  literary  and 
vital  needs  of  the  greatest  number  of  readers  on  the 
broadest  and  firmest  possible  ground  of  inspiration 
and  interest. 

The  art  of  Mr.  Phillips  grew  with  his  life,  and  mod 
ern  literature  grew  with  it  in  no  inappreciable  or  in 
significant  degree.  In  a  widely  quoted  interview 
shortly  before  his  death  he  said :  "  I  have  no  mission, 
no  purpose,  no  cult ;  I  am  just  a  novelist,  telling  as 
accurately  as  I  can  what  I  see  and  trying  to  hold  my 
job  with  my  readers." 

Stories  of  his  untiring  industry,  of  his  habit  of 
writing  for  hours  standing  up,  of  writing  at  night 
and  turning  out  6,000  or  7,000  words  between  ten 
p.  M.  and  daylight,  are  commonplace  and  characteris 
tic.  In  the  interview  quoted  above  he  went  on  to 
sav: 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  187 

"  Symptoms  of  the  artistic  temperament  should  be 
fought  to  the  death.  Work,  work,  whether  you  want 
to  or  not.  I  throw  away  a  whole  day's  work  some 
times,  but  the  effort  of  turning  it  out  has  kept  my 
steam  up  and  prevented  me  from  lagging  behind. 
You  cannot  work  an  hour  at  anything  without  learn 
ing  something. 

"  The  matter  of  giving  life  to  the  pages  of  a  novel 
is  the  result  of  industrious  study  of  human  beings. 
Writing  is  the  result  of  thinking  about  things  to 
write  about  and  studying  the  details  of  contempo 
raneous  life,  so  that  you  may  set  them  down,  not  im 
aginatively,  but  accurately." 

In  the  interval  of  ten  years  between  his  death  and 
the  publication  of  his  first  work  of  fiction,  besides  nu 
merous  short  stories  and  special  articles,  The  Worth 
of  a  Woman,  The  Treason  of  the  Senate  and  The 
Reign  of  Gilt,  he  managed  to  turn  out  nearly  twenty 
novels.  The  majority  of  these  average  at  least 
100,000  words. 

It  is  questionable  if  in  the  whole  history  of  modern  <, 
fiction  since  Balzac's  time  and  Zola's,  ten  years'  prod-  / 
net   of  such   solid,  concentrated,  comprehensive,   far 
reaching  and  inspiring  work  has  ever  issued  from  the 
pen  of  any  one  man. 

There  is  a  closer  kinship  between  the  greater 
Frenchman  and  the  American  than  mere  passionate 
concentration  in  the  wrork  in  hand  year  by  year  that 
Zola  shared  with  both. 

Phillips  did  not  set  to  wrork  of  fixed  purpose  to  con 
struct  a  "  Comedie  Humaine,"  as  did  Balzac.  None 
the  less,  in  his  novels  viewed  as  a  whole,  he  has  achieved 
almost  as  comprehensive  and  constructive  an  account 


188     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  early  twentieth  century  American  fundamentals  as 
Balzac  did  of  early  nineteenth  century  life  in 
France,  in  twice  the  number  of  volumes.  Both  have 
the  same  artist's  and  craftsman's  conscientiousness, 
the  same  love  of  truth  and  its  portrayal,  the  same  di 
rectness  of  vision  and  clarity  of  style.  Phillips,  like 
his  century,  has  the  truer  sense  of  cosmic  proportion 
and  the  keener  eye  for  essentials.  Balzac  wrote  as  an 
artist  for  aristocrats.  Phillips  wrote  for  the  people 
as  a  trained  newspaper  man,  in  whom  the  science  of 
journalistic  and  literary  construction  rapidly  devel 
oped  into  an  art  and  artistry  of  his  own. 

Any  examination  of  the  mere  titles  of  his  books  — 
The  Great  God  Success,  A  Woman  Ventures,  Golden 
Fleece,  The  Master  Rogue,  The  Plum  Tree,  The  Del 
uge,  The  Cost,  The  Social  Secretary,  The  Fortune 
Hunter,  Her  Serene  Highness,  The  Second  Genera 
tion,  Light-fingered  Gentry,  Old  Wives  for  New,  The 
Hungry  Heart,  White  Magic,  The  Fashionable  Ad 
ventures  of  Joshua  Craig,  The  Husband's  Story,  The 
Gram  of  Dust,  and  The  Price  She  Paid  —  will  go  far 
to  substantiate  a  part  of  these  claims. 

He  began  with  the  newspaper  life  that  he  knew 
from  the  inside  out  and  the  bottom  up.  His  first 
novel,  The  Great  God  Success,  1901  —  which,  in 
freshness,  vigor,  sincerity,  literary  finish  and  general 
human  interest,  ranks  not  only  among  the  author's 
best  books,  but  stands  on  its  own  merits  as  one  of 
the  important  novels  of  late  nineteenth  century  fiction 
in  America  —  tells  the  story  of  a  young  newspaper 
man  who  went  through  the  mill  much  as  Mr.  Phillips 
himself  did.  It  is  said  that  many  of  his  own  personal 
professional  experiences  are  woven  into  the  story. 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  189 

Aside  from  the  book's  merit  as  mere  literature,  we 
recognize  for  the  first  time,  as  a  new  force  in  fiction, 
the  author's  sincere  and  uncompromising  hatred  of 
snobbery,  of  pretense,  of  conventional  lies,  of  pluto 
cratic  and  machine-made  social  distinctions,  which  in 
its  intensity  and  breadth  of  scope  is  only  rivaled  in 
American  letters  by  that  of  Mark  Twain  and  Norris. 

In  this  book  he  states  clearly  his  own  literary  and 
social  creed :  "  I  must  learn  to  write  for  the  people, 
he  thought,  and  that  means  to  write  the  most  difficult 
of  styles.  .  .  .  That  story  of  yours  reads  as  if  a  child 
might  have  written  it.  I  don't  see  how  you  get  such 
effects  without  any  style  at  all.  You  just  let  your 
story  tell  itself.  .  .  .  Temperament  —  that's  one  of 
the  subtlest  forms  of  self-excuse.  .  .  .  Unadulterated 
truth  always  arouses  suspicion  in  the  unaccustomed 
public.  It  has  the  alarming  tastelessness  of  distilled 
water.  .  .  .  Freedom's  battles  were  never  fought  by 
men  with  full  stomachs  and  full  purses.  ...  I  won 
der,  he  replied  slowly,  does  a  rich  man  own  his  prop 
erty  or  does  it  own  him  ?  " 

The  keynote  of  the  book  is  in  the  last  sentence. 
The  young  reporter  eventually  becomes  editor  and 
owner  of  one  of  the  most  important  papers  in  New 
York.  The  girl  he  should  have  married  dies  while 
he  is  still  young.  Later  he  marries  into  the  New 
York  Plutocracy,  which  in  time  owns  him  as  it  owns 
his  wife.  Gradually  he  manages  to  divert  the  policy 
of  his  paper  from  the  cause  of  freedom  to  that  of  re 
action.  As  a  reward  for  his  services  he  is  finally 
made  American  Ambassador  to  the  Court  of  St. 
James.  There  he  has  his  portrait  painted  by  an 
artist  famous  for  his  moral  vivisections  on  canvas. 


190     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Howard,  the  ambassador,  and  his  wife  hear  two 
strangers  telling  the  truth  about  the  man  and  this 
portrait  in  the  gallery  where  the  picture  is  exhibited. 
They  depart  in  haste,  and  the  story  ends  with  the 
words :  "  He  caught  her  glance  in  the  little  mirror  at 
the  side  of  the  hansom  —  caught  it  and  read  it. 
And  he  began  to  hate  her,  this  instrument  to  his  pun 
ishment,  this  constant  remembrance  of  his  downfall." 

It  is  enough  to  say  of  this  conclusion  that  it 
parallels  and  deserves  to  rank  with  that  of  Norris's 
McTeague.  Equally  forcible,  it  is  reached  with  less 
effort. 

A  Woman  Ventures  is  written  around  a  news 
paper  woman  born  and  bred  to  a  life  of  fashion, 
and  two  newspaper  men.  Two  of  them  the  author 
takes  abroad  in  the  course  of  the  story  before  he 
brings  them  home  again. 

"  I  think  the  strongest  desire  I  have  is  to  see  my 
country  shake  off  the  English  influence  —  the  self- 
righteousness,  the  snobbishness.  In  England,  if  a 
man  of  brains  compels  recognition,  they  hasten  to 
give  him  a  title.  Their  sense  of  consistency  in  snob 
bishness  must  not  be  violated.  They  put  snobbish 
ness  into  their  church  service  and  create  a  snob-god 
who  calls  some  Englishmen  to  be  lords  and  others 
to  be  servants." 

"  But  there  is  nothing  like  that  in  America  ?  " 

He  has  something  to  say  here  about  literary  snob 
bishness  as  well: 

"  She  spoke  the  precise  English  of  those  who  have 
heard  a  great  deal  of  the  other  kind  and  dread  a 
lapse  into  it.  She  was  amusingly  a  '  literary  per 
son,'  full  of  the  nasty-nice  phrases  current  among 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  191 

those  literary  folk  who  take  themselves  seriously  as 
custodians  of  an  art  and  a  Language." 

The  action  of  the  story  till  its  final  inspiring  and 
unexpected  climax  is  sufficiently  indicated  by  the  fol 
lowing  quotations : 

"  The  real  tragedy  of  life  is  not  the  fall  of  splen 
did  fortunes,  nor  the  death  of  those  who  are  beloved, 
nor  any  other  of  the  obvious  calamities,  but  the  petty, 
inglorious  ending  of  friendships  and  loves  that  have 
seemed  eternal.  .  .  ." 

"  But  when  one  is  starving,  he  doesn't  look  at  the 
Ten  Commandments  before  seizing  the  bread  that  of 
fers. 

"  Not  at  the  Ten  Commandments  —  no.  But  at 
the  one. — '  Thou  shalt  not  kill  thy  self-respect.'  .  .  . 

"  If  you  ever  make  up  your  mind  to  do  wrong  .  .  . 
don't  lie  to  yourself.  Just  look  at  the  temptation 
frankly  and  at  the  price.  And  if  you  will  or  must, 
why,  pay  and  make  off  with  your  paste  diamonds  or 
your  gold  brick  or  whatever  little  luxury  of  the  kind 
you  went  into  Mr.  License's  shop  to  buy.  What  is 
the  use  of  lying  to  one's  self?  We  are  poor  crea 
tures  indeed,  it  seems  to  me,  if  there  is  not  one  person 
that  we  dare  face  with  the  honest  truth." 

This  book,  while  well  above  the  average  of  current 
American  fiction,  is  comparatively  unimportant  as  a 
literary  product  and  a  new  indication  of  growth.  In 
some  ways  it  strikes  one  as  younger  and  cruder  than 
its  predecessor;  at  the  same  time,  it  is  significant  of 
the  author's  point  of  view,  the  intense  sincerity  of 
his  purpose  and  the  effective  democracy  of  his  liter 
ary  and  personal  standard. 

For  some  time  after  this  Mr.  Phillips  was  at  a  loss 


192     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

to  find  himself.  However,  one  feels  instinctively  as 
one  reads  book  after  book  of  his  middle  period,  that 
the  man's  one  aim  is  to  tell  the  truth  simply  and  ef 
fectively  as  he  sees  it ;  that  sooner  or  later  he  is  going 
to  convince  his  readers  that  the  real  tragedies  of  life 
are  not  its  melodramatic  ones,  but  the  tragedies  of 
character  and  of  economics :  infinitely  little,  or  in 
finitely  degrading  in  their  wholesale  effect,  which, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  are  forming  the  very 
pattern  and  fabric  of  the  lives  of  us  all,  through 
every  waking  and  sleeping  hour. 

This  period  in  the  author's  life  coincided  with  one 
in  the  lives  of  his  contemporaries,  when  the  literature 
of  the  muck-rake  got  its  name  and  its  first  intelligent 
and  sympathetic  hearing  at  the  bar  of  public  opinion. 

If  Golden  Fleece,  The  Plum  Tree,  The  Master 
Rogue,  The  Deluge  and  the  rest  of  Mr.  Phillips' 
muck-rake  novels  were  temporarily  symptomatic  of 
the  period  and  the  campaign  of  popular  educa 
tion  in  things  that  concern  us  all ;  if  as  literature 
they  were  no  better  and  no  worse  than  The  Thir 
teenth  District,  by  Brand  Whitlock,  The  Memoirs  of 
an  American  Citizen,  by  Robert  Herrick,  The 
Henchman,  by  Mark  Lee  Luther,  The  Minority, 
by  Frederic  Trevor  Hill,  The  Boss,  by  Alfred 
Henry  Lewis,  J.  Devlin,  Boss,  by  Churchill  Wil 
liams,  and  dozens  more  of  the  same  period  and 
phase  of  American  fiction,  they  would  none  the  less 
deserve  a  more  serious  and  extensive  study  both  as 
literature  and  as  human  and  sociological  documents 
than  there  is  space  for  here. 

Considered  separately,  some  of  them,  both  as  litera 
ture  and  as  journalism,  fall  below  the  highest  stand- 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  193 

ard  of  the  books  by  other  authors  quoted  above ; 
taken  as  a  whole,  they  exhibit  admirably  Mr.  Phillips' 
supreme  capacity  for  getting  hold  of  the  essential 
facts  in  contemporary  American  life  and  translating 
them  into  a  readable  and  stimulative  popular  lan 
guage  in  the  form  of  fiction. 

It  is  easy  to  pick  flaws  in  these  books ;  it  is  easy 
to  condemn  them  in  one  way  or  another  on  purely 
literary  grounds ;  but  when  one  considers  that  they 
form  primarily  a  series  of  text-books  for  beginners  in 
practical  politics,  it  becomes  plain  that  they  are  ad 
mirably  adapted  to  their  purpose. 

The  author  is  as  sure  of  his  facts  as  he  is  of  the  in 
terest  of  the  majority  of  his  readers.  He  does  not 
overstate  diseased  social  and  political  conditions.  He 
does  not  have  to.  He  does  not  make  his  grafters  and 
snobs  in  chief  impossible  or  unconscionable  variants  of 
the  average  human  type  in  America  to-day.  He 
makes  them  like  his  other  characters,  natural,  human, 
interesting,  and  essentially  characteristic  products  of 
a  modern  American  environment  for  which  the  people 
in  the  mass  are  quite  as  much  responsible  as  the  men 
and  women  higher  up. 

The  moral  of  the  whole  series,  reiterated  by  Mr. 
Phillips,  his  contemporaries  and  predecessors  from 
Lincoln  down,  is  that  the  people  in  the  long  run  get 
the  kind  of  government  they  deserve;  that  snob 
bery  is  far  more  the  product  of  those  below,  who  look 
up  to  artificial  standards,  than  of  those  above,  who 
look  down  from  them ;  that  graft  is  the  price  that  the 
people  pay  as  a  whole  for  individual  indifference  and 
inefficiency  in  public  affairs. 

In  some  ways,  in  these  political  novels,  Mr.  Phillips 


194     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

makes  us  out  a  pretty  hard  lot  of  citizens.  At  the 
same  time  he  draws  us  true  to  life  in  our  capacity  to 
wake  up  to  the  facts  that  he  sets  forth,  to  appreciate 
them,  and  to  act  on  them  progressively.  And  the 
fact  that  this  series  of  books,  few  of  which  showed  any 
perceptible  literary  or  sociological  advance  on  the 
main  arguments  of  their  predecessors,  were  able  to 
interest  the  American  book-buying  public  so  far  and 
so  long  as  they  did,  may  be  taken  as  fairly  conclu 
sive  evidence  of  the  man's  own  power  of  writing 
straight  from  the  shoulder  and  the  carrying  force  of 
the  insurgent  movement  in  American  literature,  which 
he  as  much  as  any  man  helped  to  start. 

According  to  Mr.  Calvin  Winter,  in  The  Bookman 
for  February,  1911,  "  one  gets  quite  effectively  the 
whole  range  of  Mr.  Phillips'  powers  and  also  his  weak 
nesses  in  the  volumes  that  belong  to  the  period  of  his 
mature  development,  the  volumes  produced  within  the 
last  four  or  five  years." 

It  is  indicative  of  Mr.  Winter's  point  of  view  that 
he  attributes  the  real  fault  of  Mr.  Phillips'  method  of 
work,  the  real  weakness  of  even  his  best  achievements, 
to  the  fact  "  that  he  is  not  merely  the  clear-eyed  and 
impartial  observer  of  life;  he  is  always  a  partisan 
and  reformer  ...  of  course,  when  you  take  one  of 
Mr.  Phillips's  novels  to  pieces  you  discover  that  in  its 
essence  it  is  a  problem  novel ;  but  this  side  of  his  work 
he  has  learned  to  disguise  pretty  cleverly.  It  is  not 
so  much  the  way  in  which  he  twists  the  lives  of  his 
characters  in  order  to  point  a  moral,  but  rather  .  .  . 
the  somewhat  annoying  fact  that  he  is  trying  to  do 
our  thinking  for  us.  .  .  ." 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  195 

It  docs  not  take  the  experience  of  a  critic  like  .Mr. 
Winter  to  discover  that  the  majority  of  Mr.  Phil- 
lips's  books  are  problem  novels.  A  child  could  see  it ; 
and  one  of  the  facts  that  has  probably  escaped  Mr. 
Winter's  notice  is  that  Mr.  Phillips  is  writing  not 
only  for  adults  whose  knowledge  of  the  best  fiction, 
ancient  and  modern,  is  inferior  to  that  of  the  average 
well-read  child  of  fourteen  or  fifteen,  but  also  for  the 
young  Americans  of  to-day  and  to-morrow  who  are 
born  to  be  partisans  and  reformers,  in  literature  and 
out  of  it,  as  inevitably  as  men  of  Mr.  Winter's  type 
are  born  to  be  mildly  pretentious  spectators  of  life 
and  art,  sitters  on  the  literary  fence,  and  ineffectively 
destructive  critics  and  cumberers  of  the  earth. 

Mr.  Winter,  in  an  essay  of  several  thousand  words 
—  written  shortly  before  the  author's  death  —  in 
which  he  finds  himself  forced  to  admit  the  novelist's 
breadth  and  depth  of  interest  in  the  serious  problems 
of  life,  and  his  outspoken  fearlessness  in  handling 
them,  shows  small  signs  of  appreciating  Mr.  Phil 
lips'  cumulative  growth  in  power  and  fineness  of 
craftsmanship. 

He  does  suggest  that  Mr.  Phillips  must  have 
learned  something  about  the  best  French  realism  at 
the  fountain  head.  He  tells  us  that  the  author's 
whole  conception  of  what  a  novel  should  be  is  French 
rather  than  Anglo-Saxon;  that  he  insists  on  seeing 
every  human  story  as  a  cross-section  of  life  —  not  as 
a  little  local  cross-section,  but  as  a  part  of  a  big  in 
evitable  and  all-pervading  human  relationship  stretch 
ing  from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific.  He  says  that 
the  writer  who  sees  each  little  human  happening  not 


196     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

as  an  isolated  incident  but  as  a  detail,  necessarily 
communicates  to  his  readers  an  impression  of  bigness 
and  vitality. 

At  the  same  time  he  asks  why  it  is  that  so  many 
of  Mr.  Phillips's  books,  starting  with  big  ethical  prob 
lems  and  a  broad  epic  treatment,  are  so  apt  in  the 
end  to  leave  the  impression  of  an  isolated  and  ex 
ceptional  human  story  instead  of  symbolizing  some 
broad  and  universal  principle. 

He  is  inclined  to  quarrel  with  Mr.  Phillips  because 
he  fails  to  symbolize,  as  Zola  does  in  L'argent,  Le 
venire  de  Paris  and  L'assommoir,  "  vast  symbo 
lic  monsters  wreaking  their  malignant  pleasure  upon 
mankind."  He  suggests  that  Mr.  Phillips  reverses  the 
usual  process  followed  by  writers  of  the  epic  type; 
that  he  finds  his  germ  idea  in  a  single  character  or 
incident,  and  builds  from  these,  instead  of  starting 
with  some  ethical  principle  or  psychological  prob 
lem  and  then  searching  for  characters  and  inci 
dents  that  would  best  illustrate  it.  He  complains 
that  the  novelist  quite  frequently  pictures  not 
what  average  people  are  doing  under  existing 
conditions,  but  what  somewhat  unusual  people  would 
in  his  opinion  do  under  conditions  just  the  reverse 
of  those  that  exist.  He  instances,  in  support  of  this, 
the  development  under  pressure  of  the  heirs  of  the 
rich  middle  Western  Manufacturer  in  The  Second 
Generation,  who  disinherits  his  children  (his  son  con 
ditionally),  for  their  own  good;  and  the  daughter  of 
the  New  York  capitalist  who  insists  on  marrying  the 
young  artist  who  has  made  up  his  mind  to  let  no 
woman  interfere  with  his  work  till  he  has  reached  a 
certain  definite  measure  of  success  in  his  art. 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  197 

It  is  possible  that  types  like  the  young  artist  in 
question  are  more  common  even  in  New  York  than 
Mr.  Winter  seems  to  imagine;  that  girls  like  the 
one  he  eventually  marries  are  on  the  increase  there 
and  elsewhere,  and  that  rich  men  farther  West  who 
disinherit  sons  and  daughters  in  a  fair  way  to  become 
worthless  are  not  yet  wholly  obsolete. 

Mr.  Phillips  was  enough  of  a  scientist  to  know 
that  the  type  is  sometimes  best  defined  by  its 
variants. 

Mr.  Winter  is  not  yet  enough  of  a  critic  to  realize 
that  Mr.  Phillips's  books  are  primarily  novels  of 
character  and  of  American  human  nature  evolved 
under  contemporary  economic  storm  and  stress. 

In  his  later  books  he  has  very  little  use  for  the 
more  commonplace  and  subordinate  types  that  go 
down,  or  barely  hold  their  own  in  the  struggle;  or 
that  remain  stagnant  on  the  surface  of  the  social 
crust,  as  hopelessly  slaves  to  conventions  and  arti 
ficial  social  distinctions  as  those  that  never  emerge 
from  below. 

Quite  as  justly,  both  as  man  and  artist,  he  has  no 
more  use  for  those  Zolaesque  "  epic  "  themes,  tending 
to  emphasize  an  inevitable  page  of  existence  and  an 
artificial  fixity  of  social  and  economic  conditions, 
which  even  to-day  are  still  more  characteristic  of 
Europe  than  of  America, 

There  is  something  about  the  atmosphere  and  the 
spirit  of  America  to-day,  outside  New  York  and  the 
adjacent  Atlantic  seaboard,  that  still  justifies  the 
proverb :  "  From  shirt  sleeves  to  shirt  sleeves  in  three 
generations." 

Mr.  Phillips  has  seized  upon  this  force  and  for- 


198     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

mula  of  the  racial  smelting  pot,  and  has  made  it  his 
own  in  his  stories  of  the  struggle  to  break  through 
the  barriers  of  caste  and  artificiality  from  below  up 
ward,  and  from  above  down. 

Many  of  his  characters  begin  as  the  victims  of 
caste.  Frequently  we  find  these  products  of  an  en 
vironment  of  elaborate  uselessness.  Quite  as  fre 
quently  circumstances  and  their  own  desires  force 
them  to  assert  and  develop  themselves.  The  women 
that  he  chooses  for  his  heroines  go  to  work.  The 
men  that  typify  his  heroes  learn  eventually  that 
money,  like  the  pursuit  of  it  and  its  most  obvious 
results,  is  not  the  only  thing  in  life,  and  never  can 
be.  In  the  long  run  the  stronger  characters  rise 
superior  to  their  environment.  In  direct  contrast, 
each  book  that  follows  this  formula  delineates  other 
weaker  and  slighter  personages  who  remain  sub 
merged,  and  the  author's  cross-section  of  life,  in  spite 
of  apparent  abnormalities  to  the  superficial  reader's 
mind,  remains  constructively  true  to  life  as  the  great 
majority  of  the  plain  people  of  America  still  see  it 
to-day. 

Mr.  Phillips  is  here  far  more  than  an  accurate 
and  painstaking  artist,  handling  with  commendable 
thoroughness  and  increasing  power  the  raw  material 
of  the  life  closest  to  him.  He  is  a  pioneer  of  that 
new  movement  in  fiction  of  which  Arnold  Bennett 
in  England  and  Herman  Suderman  in  Germany  are 
also  notable  examples.  Such  men  deal  with  life 
directly  and  freely  as  an  elementary  fusion  of  en 
vironment  and  character,  unhampered  by  any  ultra- 
realistic,  romantic,  classical,  epic  or  academic  tra 
dition  or  preconceived  scheme  of  any  sort,  fostered 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  199 

or  thrust  upon  them  by  third-rate  critics  or  fourth- 
rate  producers. 

Such  men,  from  Rabelais  and  Cervantes  down  to 
the  present  day,  aim  to  get  at  the  basic  facts  of  life 
in  the  way  most  essential  to  the  comprehension  of  the 
vast  democratic  majority  of  their  readers,  present 
and  future.  If  they  live,  they  evolve  eventually  a 
technique  fit  for  their  task,  and  the  world  stands 
eternally  the  richer  for  their  works.  If  they  die  be 
fore  the  full  fruition  of  their  powers,  as  Frank  Nor- 
ris  and  David  Graham  Phillips  did,  none  the  less  they 
have  served  to  pioneer  the  way  for  others :  their  loss 
may  be  the  world's  gain  by  leaving  their  ultimate 
achievement  not  too  hopelessly  far  in  advance  of  the 
majority  of  their  readers,  the  academic  critics  and 
partisans,  and  the  young  men  and  women  who  write, 
born  to  follow  in  their  steps. 

When  Mr.  Winter  tells  us  that  The  Second  Gen 
eration,  1907,  is  probably  the  best  book  to  recom 
mend  to  a  reader  approaching  Mr.  Phillips  for  the 
first  time,  because  it  is  less  likely  to  arouse  antagonism 
than  many  others,  and  because  it  illustrates  his 
strongest  qualities,  "  his  ability  to  give  you  the  sense 
of  life  and  action  and  the  clash  of  many  interests," 
we  may  have  our  reasonable  doubts  of  the  facts  of 
the  case  and  of  Mr.  Winter's  appreciation  of  them. 
Similarly,  when  he  says  that  the  book  "  is  to  all  prac 
tical  interests  a  grown-up  version  of  the  story  of 
the  bad  little  boy  who  went  fishing  on  Sunday  and 
was  drowned  and  the  good  little  boy  who  went  to 
church  and  was  rewarded  with  plum  pudding." 

It  is  true  that  before  this  he  admits  that  the 
"  graphic  truth,  rugged  strength  and  sure  swiftness 


200     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  movement  of  the  first  part  of  the  book  show  one 
that  Mr.  Phillips  is  one  of  the  few  contemporary 
American  novelists  that  deserve  to  be  taken  seriously." 

The  theme  of  the  book  is  stated  in  the  language 
of  the  older  generation  ten  or  twenty  years  ago : 
"  It  is  the  curse  of  the  world,  this  inherited 
wealth.  .  .  .  Because  of  it  humanity  moves  in  circles 
instead  of  forward.  The  ground  gained  by  the  toil 
ing  generations  is  lost  by  the  inheriting  generations. 
And  this  accursed  inheritance  tempts  men  ever  to  long 
for  and  hope  for  that  which  they  have  not  earned. 
God  gave  man  a  trial  of  the  plan  of  living  in  idleness 
upon  that  which  he  had  not  earned,  and  man  fell. 
Then  God  established  the  other  plan,  and  through  it 
man  has  been  rising  —  but  rising  slowly  and  with 
njn.ny  a  backward  slip,  because  he  has  tried  to  thwart 
the  divine  plan  with  the  system  of  inheritance. 
Fortunately  the  great  mass  of  mankind  has  nothing 
to  leave  to  heirs,  has  no  hope  of  inheritance.  Thus 
no  leaders  have  ever  been  developed  in  place  of  those 
destroyed  by  prosperity.  .  .  .  No  wonder  progress 
is  slow  when  the  leaders  of  each  generation  have  to 
be  developed  from  the  bottom  over  again,  and  when 
the  ideal  of  useful  work  is  obscured  by  the  false  ideal 
of  living  without  work." 

Stated  in  more  modern  language  we  have  here  the 
biological  truth  that  the  fittest  survive  only  through 
struggle,  and  that  man,  like  all  other  animals,  makes 
his  best  records  under  handicaps.  Where  the  neces 
sity  for  struggle  is  removed,  the  species  or  the  race 
degenerates  and  inevitably  falls  a  prey  to  those  that 
are  still  struggling.  This  is  as  true  in  the  world  of 
character  as  in  that  of  material  things. 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  201 

Mr.  Phillips  does  not  announce  this  as  a  new  dis 
covery.  He  makes  us  realize  that  men  and  women 
have  long  realized  it  in  their  lives  as  well  as  in  their 
thoughts,  in  certain  sections  of  this  country ;  and 
that  their  children,  under  favorable  conditions,  are 
still  fit  to  do  as  their  fathers  have  done. 

This  is  in  some  respects  the  most  sectional  of  his 
books.  Hiram  Ranger,  self-made  man  and  million 
aire  manufacturer,  makes  flour  and  barrels  in  a  small 
Western  town.  His  children  have  been  educated  in 
the  East ;  and  long  before  sudden  failure  of  strength 
warns  him  of  approaching  death,  he  has  had  reason 
to  feel  dissatisfied  with  the  typical  products  of  East 
ern  universities  and  girls'  finishing  schools.  He 
takes  his  measures  accordingly,  and  in  the  end  they 
are  justified,  though  he  does  not  live  to  see  it.  His 
son  falls  in  love  with  a  girl  who  has  a  profession  of 
her  own,  and  is  alternately  shamed  and  encouraged 
into  making  a  man  of  himself  and  taking  his  father's 
place.  The  bulk  of  the  estate  is  left  in  trust  to  be 
administered  for  the  benefit  of  a  Western  university. 
The  daughter  marries  the  son  of  one  of  the  trustees, 
who  eventually  becomes  president  of  the  university, 
and  who  comes  very  close  to  proving  that  a  man 
wise  enough  to  administer  a  big  modern  university 
successfully  may  fail  to  save  his  own  household  affairs 
from  disaster. 

Incidentally  we  have  an  attempt  to  discredit 
Ranger's  son,  after  he  has  been  made  manager  of  the 
company,  by  illegal  depreciation  of  the  company's 
stock.  Young  Ranger  rises  to  the  occasion.  "  '  You 
understand  how  to  manage  men  '  his  wrife  tells  him, 
*  and  you  understand  business.' 


202     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  '  But  unfortunately  this  is  not  business.' 

"  He  was  right.  The  problem  of  business  is  in 
its  two  main  factors  perfectly  simple  —  to  make  a 
wanted  article  and  to  put  it  where  those  who  want 
it  can  buy.  But  this  was  not  Arthur  Ranger's  prob 
lem,  nor  is  it  the  problem  of  most  business  men  in 
our  times.  Between  maker  and  customer  nowadays 
lie  the  brigands  who  control  the  railways  —  that  is 
the  highways,  and  they  with  equal  facility  use  or 
defy  the  law  according  to  their  needs.  When  Ar 
thur  went  a-buying  grain  or  stave  timber,  he  and 
those  with  whom  he  was  trading  had  to  placate  the 
brigands  before  they  could  trade ;  when  he  went  a- 
selling  flour  he  had  to  fight  to  the  markets  through 
the  brigands." 

None  the  less  Arthur  and  Dory  Hargrave,  his 
brother-in-law,  fix  things  in  the  end  so  that  the  fac 
tory  and  the  university  can  be  made  to  interlock  their 
working  schedules  with  profit  to  both. 

"  He's  going  to  establish  a  seven  hours  working 
day  and  if  possible  cut  it  down  to  six.  .  .  .  The 
university  is  to  change  its  schedules  so  that  all  its 
practical  courses  will  be  at  hours  when  men  working 
in  the  factory  can  take  them.  It's  simply  another 
development  of  his  and  Dory's  idea  that  a  factory 
belonging  to  a  university  ought  to  set  a  decent  ex 
ample  —  ought  not  to  compel  its  men  to  work  longer 
than  is  necessary  to  earn  an  honest  living  for  them 
selves  and  their  families.  .  .  .  Working  people  have 
had  to  work  so  hard  for  others  .  .  .  they've  had  no 
chance  to  learn  how  to  spend  free  time  sensibly. 
But  they'll  learn,  those  of  them  that  have  capacity 
for  improvement.  Those  that  haven't  will  soon  drop 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  203 

out.  .  .  .  The  factories  can't  make  money  on  such 
a  plan  as  that. 

"...  No,  not  dividends  .  .  .  But  dividends  are 
to  be  abolished  in  that  department  of  the  university, 
just  as  they  are  in  the  other  departments.  And  the 
money  the  university  needs  is  to  come  from  tuition 
fees.  Everyone  is  to  pay  for  what  he  gets.  Some 
one  has  to  pay  for  it ;  why  not  the  person  who  gets 
the  benefit?  Especially  when  the  university's  farms 
and  workshops  and  factories  give  every  student,  man 
and  woman,  a  chance  to  earn  a  good  living.  I  tell 
you,  Adelaide,  the  time  is  coming  when  every  kind  of 
school  except  kindergartens  will  be  self-supporting. 
And  then  you'll  see  a  human  race  that  is  really  fine, 
really  capable,  has  a  real  stand  of  self-respect." 

This  sort  of  thing  does  not  pervade  the  volume. 
The  conversation  in  which  it  takes  place  is  towards 
the  end  of  a  long  book,  and  the  section  covered  by 
this  particular  phase  of  the  discussion  consists  of 
less  than  three  pages. 

To  people  of  Mr.  Winter's  point  of  view  this  may 
be  bad  art  and  worse  literary  construction. 

Anyone  who  sees  American  life  of  to-day  as 
directly  as  David  Graham  Phillips  did,  with  the  same 
absence  of  superficiality  and  hereditary  prejudice, 
ought  to  be  able  to  recognize  that  America  is  full  of 
people  who  are  makers  of  plans  —  in  some  cases  work 
ing  them  out  successfully  —  for  the  reorganization  of 
education  and  industrial  life  in  this  country  on  a  fair 
working  basis  of  profit  and  a  square  deal  to  all  con 
cerned. 

Men  and  women  in  this  country  to-day  do  talk 
so  at  times  to  one  another.  They  do  mean  what  they 


204     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

say,  and  they  do  at  times  make  good  their  words  by 
their  deeds.  Anyone  who  has  written  as  fully  and 
freely,  as  sincerely  and  forcibly,  of  conditions  in  this 
country  to-day  as  Mr.  Phillips  has,  must  inevitably, 
sooner  or  later,  have  included  men  and  women  like 
those  in  his  gallery  of  national  types. 

The  Second  Generation  is  unmistakably  and  suc 
cessfully  a  novel  with  a  purpose.  It  is  neither  the 
novel  of  a  doctrinaire  nor  a  mere  attenuated  socio- 
logic-political  tract.  Its  interest  holds  from  start 
to  finish  even  when  the  author  provides  such  obvious 
truisms  as  the  following:  "I've  been  thinking  .  .  . 
a  good  deal  lately,  and  I've  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  there  is  really  a  rotten  streak  in  what  we've 
been  getting  there  in  the  East  —  you  at  Harvard, 
I  at  Miss  Spenser's  Select  School  for  Young  Ladies. 
There  are  ways  in  which  mother  and  father  are  bet 
ter  educated  than  me  .  .  .  Still  mother  and  father 
are  narrow-minded  .  .  .  Isn't  everybody  about 
people  who  don't  think  as  they  do?  " 

"  I  don't  stand  for  the  notion  that  marriage  is  liv 
ing  in  luxury  and  lolling  in  carriages  and  showing 
off  before  strangers.  .  .  .  The  girl  that  wants  my 
son  only  if  he  has  money  to  enable  her  to  make  a  fool 
of  herself  ain't  fit  to  be  a  wife  and  a  mother.  .  .  . 
The  man  that  looks  at  what  a  woman  has  will  never 
look  at  wrhat  she  is  —  and  my  daughter's  well  rid  of 
him." 

"  That  damned  East !  We  send  it  most  of  our 
money  and  our  best  young  men ;  and  what  do  we  get 
from  it  in  return?  Why,  sneers  and  snob  ideas." 

"  Europe  is  full  of  that  kind  of  place.  You  can't 
glance  out  doors,  without  seeing  a  house  or  a  ruin 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  205 

where  the  sweat  and  blood  of  peasants  was  squandered. 
.  .  .  You  might  have  told  her  that  scandal  isn't  his 
tory,  that  history  never  was  made  in  such  places. 
As  for  the  people  who  live  there  now,  they  are  cer 
tainly  not  worth  while  —  the  same  pretentious  ig 
norance  that  used  to  live  there,  except  that  they  have 
no  longer  fangs.  .  .  .  It's  impossible  for  me  to 
forget  that  every  luxurious  idler  means  scores  who 
have  to  work  long  hours  for  almost  nothing  in  order 
that  he  may  be  of  no  use  to  the  world  or  himself." 

"  But  my  father  was  a  working  man.  That  was  a 
long  time  ago.  That  was  when  America  used  to  be 
American." 

"  He  himself  disliked  servants  about,  hated  to  abet 
a  fellow-being  in  looking  on  himself  or  herself  as  an 
inferior ;  and  he  regarded  as  one  of  the  basest  as  well 
as  subtlest  poisons  of  snobbishness,  the  habit  of  tell 
ing  others  to  do  for  one  the  menial,  personal  things 
that  can  be  done  with  dignity  only  by  oneself." 

"  Whenever  the  world  has  got  a  fair  start  toward 
becoming  civilized,  along  have  come  wealth  and  lux 
ury  to  smother  and  kill.  It's  very  interesting  to  read 
history  from  that  standpoint  instead  of  taking  the 
usual  view  that  luxury  produces  the  arts  and 
graces." 

It  is  doubtful  if  Walt  Whitman  himself,  or  any  one 
else  in  American  literature,  has  pushed  plain  speak 
ing,  in  the  mouths  of  plain  men  and  women  or  in  his 
own,  to  the  point  that  Mr.  Phillips  has.  Any  impar 
tial  survey  of  these  quotations  will  at  least  show  that 
he  is  consistent  and  sincere  in  his  point  of  view  and 
the  use  he  makes  of  it.  Much  of  his  doctrine  is 
simply  sublimated  common-sense. 


206     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  Common-sense  —  absolute  common-sense  —  al 
ways  sounds  incongruous  in  a  conventional  atmos 
phere.  In  its  milder  forms  it  produces  the  effect  of 
wit ;  in  stronger  doses  it  is  a  violent  irritant ;  in  large 
quantity  it  causes  those  to  whom  it  is  administered 
to  regard  the  person  administering  it  as  insane.  .  .  . 
When  you  think  of  all  that  the  human  race  has  been 
through,  you  realize  that  everyone  that  has  survived 
must  be  very  superior,  the  less  sheltered  the  more  su 
perior. 

"  Fate  does  sometimes  force  mischief  on  men  and 
women.  .  .  .  But  usually  fate  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  matter.  It's  we  ourselves  that  course  for 
mischief,  like  a  dog  for  rabbits.  .  .  .  His  was  not 
the  knowledge  that  enfeebles,  but  the  knowledge  that 
empowers.  .  .  .  Judge  Torrey  once  said,  '  You've 
only  got  to  look  at  him  to  see  that  he's  the  kind  that 
does  things,  not  the  kind  that  tells  how  they  used  to 
be  done  or  how  they  ought  to  be  done.' 

"  Nobody's  born  wise  and  mighty  few  take  the 
trouble  to  learn. 

"  There  never  was  a  man  as  timid  as  you  that 
wasn't  honest.  What  a  shallow  world  it  is !  How 
often  envy  and  cowardice  pass  for  virtue. 

"  No  imagination,  that's  the  secret  of  the  stupid 
ity  and  the  horror  of  change  and  of  the  notion  that 
the  way  a  thing's  done  to-day  is  the  way  it'll  always 
be  done.  .  .  .  The  ability  absolutely  to  trust  where 
trust  is  necessary  is  as  essential  to  affection  as  is 
the  ability  to  withhold  trust  until  its  wisdom  has  been 
justified;  and  exceptions  only  confirm  a  rule. 

"  Adelaide  felt  sorry  for  the  poor,  but  she  had  yet 
to  learn  that  she  was  of  them,  as  poor  in  other  and 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  207 

more  important  ways  as  they  in  money  and  draw 
ing-room  manners.  Surfaces  and  things  of  the  sur 
face  obscured  and  distorted  all  the  realities  for  her 
as  for  most  of  us ;  and  the  fact  that  her  intelligence 
laughed  at  and  scorned  her  perverted  instincts  was 
of  as  little  help  to  her  as  it  is  to  most  of  us. 

"  He  had  become  what  the  ineffective  call  a  pessi 
mist.  He  had  learned  the  primer  lesson  of  large  suc 
cess  —  that  one  must  build  upon  the  hard  pessimis 
tic  facts  of  human  nature's  instability  and  fate's 
fondness  for  mischief,  not  upon  the  optimistic  clouds 
of  belief  that  everybody  is  good  and  faithful  and 
friendly  disposed,  and  everything  will  come  out  all 
right  somehow.  .  .  . 

"  He  was  an  illustration  of  the  shallowness  of  the 
talk  about  the  loneliness  of  great  souls.  It  is  the 
great  souls  alone  that  are  not  alone.  They  under 
stand  better  than  the  self-conscious  posing  mass  of 
mankind,  the  weakness  and  pettiness  of  human  nature  ; 
but  they  also  appreciate  its  other  side.  And  in  this 
pettiness  of  the  creature  they  still  see  the  greatness 
that  is  in  every  human  being,  its  majesty  of  mystery 
and  of  potentiality,  potentiality  of  its  position  and 
source  of  ever-ascending  forms  of  life.  From  the 
protoplasmal  cell  descends  the  genius;  from  the  loins 
of  the  sodden  toiler  chained  to  the  soil  springs  the 
mother  of  genius  or  genius  itself.  And  where  little 
people  were  bored  and  isolated,  Dory  Hargrave  could 
without  effort  pass  the  barrier  to  any  human  heart, 
could  enter  in  and  sit  at  its  inmost  hearth  a  welcome 
guest." 

Few  men  have  written  the  literature  of  democracy 
more  convincingly.  Altogether  The  Second  Gen- 


208     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

eration  is  a  big  and  inspiring  book.  Its  one  ap 
parent  defect  in  construction,  the  tragic  and  uncalled 
for  death  of  one  of  the  most  lovable  characters 
through  the  act  of  a  madman,  has  a  curious  and  con 
vincing  parallel  in  the  life  and  death  of  the  author 
himself.  Mr.  Phillips  wrote  of  life  not  according  to 
any  artificial  and  pre-arranged  literary  or  social 
scheme ;  but  of  life  as  it  actually  happens  everywhere 
around  us,  day  by  day,  in  an  America  that  the  greed 
and  negligence  of  the  American  people  have  filled 
with  by-products  of  fanatic  hatred  and  irresponsi 
bility  ;  products  that  the  people  of  America  are  forced 
to-day,  in  one  way  or  another,  to  pay  for  and  reckon 
with. 

n. 

This  is  the  theme  of  Light-fingered  Gentry,  1907, 
which  deals  with  the  recent  investigation  into  the 
scandals  connected  with  the  great  insurance  companies 
of  New  York  City. 

The  story  is  that  of  Horace  Armstrong,  a  young 
man  brought  from  the  West  and  made  president  of 
the  Mutual  Association  against  Old  Age  and  Death 
by  Fosdick,  that  big  business  boss  who  dominates  the 
company's  affairs;  and  of  Neva,  his  wife,  separated 
from  him  in  the  first  chapter  by  common  consent  at 
the  moment  of  his  removal  to  New  York,  and  re 
united  to  him  in  the  last,  after  he  has  thoroughly  ex 
posed  the  whole  system  of  graft  focussed  in  the  cen 
tral  office,  and  ramifying  throughout  its  various 
branches,  and  after  he  has  triumphantly  refuted  all 
charges  against  himself  before  an  investigating  com 
mittee  of  the  company's  shareholders. 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  209 

In  the  meantime  Neva  comes  to  New  York  and  de 
cides  to  make  a  career  for  herself.  She  is  aided  in 
this  by  Narcisse  Siersdorf,  a  woman  architect,  and 
by  Boris  Raphael,  a  painter  who  is  in  many  ways 
quite  as  much  of  a  dominant  personality  as  Arm 
strong  is. 

"  But  for  Boris,  Neva  might  have  gone  through 
life,  not  indeed  as  stunted  a  development  as  she  had 
been  under  the  blight  of  her  unfortunate  marriage, 
but  far  from  the  rounded  personality  presenting  all 
sides  to  the  influences  that  make  for  growth  and  re7 
spending  to  them  eagerly.  Heart,  and  his  younger 
brother,  Mind,  are  two  newcomers  in  a  universe  of 
force.  They  fare  better  than  formerly ;  they  will 
fare  better  hereafter;  but  they  are  still  like  infants 
exposed  in  the  wilderness.  Some  fine  natures  have 
enough  of  the  tough  fiber  successfully  to  make  the 
fight ;  others,  though  they  lack  it,  persist  and  prevail 
by  chance  —  for  the  brute  pressure  of  force  is  not 
malign ;  it  crushes  and  spares  at  haphazard.  Again 
there  are  finer  natures  —  who  knows  ?  Perhaps  the 
finest  of  all,  the  best  minds,  the  best  hearts  —  that 
either  cannot  or  will  not  conform  to  the  conditions. 
They  wither  and  die  —  not  of  weakness,  since  in  this 
world  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest,  the  fit  are  often 
the  weak,  the  unfit  the  strong.  All  around  us  they 
are  withering,  dying,  like  the  good  seed  cast  on  stony 
ground  —  the  good  minds,  the  good  hearts,  the  men 
and  women  needing  only  love  and  appreciation  and 
encouragement  to  shine  forth  in  mental,  moral  and 
physical  beauty.  Of  these  had  been  Neva." 

Such  she  continues  to  the  end,  once  she  begins  to 
get  her  growth. 


210     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Armstrong,  like  most  masters  of  men,  has  rather 
more  toughness  than  fineness  in  his  make-up.  By  a 
lucky  chance  at  the  beginning  of  his  incumbency,  he 
gets  hold  of  documents  that  show  him  how  far  the  for 
mer  incumbent  had  been  Fosdick's  slave;  and  the 
struggle  to  free  himself  from  captivity,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  keep  the  reins  of  power  in  his  hands,  is 
told  as  only  a  trained  journalist,  equipped  equally 
with  the  tersest  and  most  graphic  newspaper  Eng 
lish  and  the  facts  of  the  insurance  situation  from  the 
inside,  could  have  told  it.  Armstrong  meets  his  wife, 
who  has  been  divorced  from  him,  after  Narcisse  and 
Boris  have  wrought  wonders  with  her.  He  makes  up 
his  mind  to  marry  her  again  when  he  discovers  that 
Boris  has  a  similar  end  in  view,  and  the  story  of  his 
own  spiritual  regeneration  follows  this  discovery. 

In  Armstrong  and  Neva,  Mr.  Phillips  has  symbol 
ized  the  American  business  man  at  his  best,  as  we 
find  him  to-day  in  charge  of  the  nation's  big  business, 
and  the  woman  who  is  best  fitted  by  temperament  and 
experience  to  be  his  wife  and  the  mother  of  his  chil 
dren. 

Narcisse  Siersdorf  is  a  fine  type  of  the  successful 
New  York  professional  woman,  sympathetically  and 
convincingly  delineated. 

Boris  Raphael,  cynic  and  rake,  possessed  none  the 
less  of  a  noble  genius  in  his  art,  is  less  sympathetic, 
slightly  less  convincing;  at  the  same  time  he  remains 
essentially  human  like  the  other  characters  of  the 
book.  Fosdick,  the  master  rogue,  Joe  Morris,  his 
Corporation  Counsel  in  chief,  Hugo,  his  superlatively 
useless  and  self-complacent  son,  and  the  wives  and 
other  women  of  their  respective  families,  are  all  of 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

them  drawn  to  the  life  with  a  few  rapid  touches :  they 
are  inevitably  the  product  of  the  social  and  financial 
conditions  that  the  book  represents. 

Mr.  Phillips  postulates  as  his  first  principle  of 
life  and  art  that,  in  order  to  write  a  literature  of 
contemporary  American  life  which  shall  be  real  and 
lasting,  one  is  forced  to  study  and  to  represent  the 
industrial  conditions  and  the  economic  forces  that 
have  that  life  in  the  making.  In  this  book  he  puts  it- 
in  this  way: 

"  To  understand  a  human  being  in  any  or  all  of 
his  or  her  aspects,  however  far  removed  from  the 
apparently  material,  it  is  necessary  to  understand 
how  the  man  or  woman  comes  by  the  necessities  of 
life  —  food,  clothing,  shelter.  To  study  human  na 
ture  either  in  the  broad  or  in  detail,  leaving  these 
matters  out  of  account,  is  as  if  an  anatomist  were  to 
try  to  understand  the  human  body,  having  first  taken 
away  the  vital  organs  and  the  arteries  and  veins. 
It  is  the  method  of  the  man's  income  that  determines 
the  man ;  and  his  paradings  and  posturings,  his  loves, 
hatreds,  generosities,  meannesses,  all  are  either  un 
important  or  but  the  surface  signs  of  the  deep,  the 
real  emotions  that  constitute  the  vital  nucleus  of  the 
real  man. 

"  In  the  material  relations  of  a  man  or  a  woman, 
in  the  material  relations  of  husband  and  wife,  of  par 
ents  and  children,  lie  the  ultimate,  the  true  explana 
tions  of  human  conduct.  This  has  always  been  so, 
in  all  ages  and  classes,  and  it  will  be  so  until  the 
chief  concern  of  the  human  animal,  and  therefore  its 
chief  compelling  motive,  ceases  to  be  the  pursuit  of 
the  necessities  and  luxuries  that  enable  it  to  live  from 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

day  to  day  and  that  safeguard  it  in  old  age.  The 
filling  and  emptying  and  filling  again  of  the  purse 
perform  towards  the  mental  and  moral  life  a  func 
tion  as  vital  as  the  emptying  and  filling  again  of  the 
heart  and  lungs  perform  in  the  life  of  the  body." 

The  following  quotations  will  give  some  idea  of 
how  this  theory  is  worked  out: 

"  Like  most  women  .  .  .  Neva  was  densely  igno 
rant  of  and  wholly  uninterested  in  business  —  the 
force  that  has  within  a  few  decades  become  titanic 
and  has  revolutionized  the  internal  as  well  as  the  ex 
ternal  basis  of  life  as  completely  as  if  we  had  been 
whisked  away  to  another  planet.  She  still  talked 
and  tried  to  think  in  the  old  traditional  lines  in  which 
the  books,  grave  and  light,  are  still  written  and  edu 
cation  is  still  restricted  —  although  these  lines  have 
absolutely  ceased  to  bear  upon  our  real  life,  as  have 
the  gods  of  the  classic  world.  It  had  never  occurred 
to  her  that  what  the  men  did  when  they  went  to  their 
offices  involved  the  whole  of  society  in  all  its  relations, 
touched  her  life  more  intimately  even  than  her  paint 
ing.  But,  without  her  realizing  it,  the  idea  had  grad 
ually  formed  in  her  mind  that  the  proceedings  down 
town  were  morally  not  unlike  the  occupation  of  coal- 
heaver  or  scavenger  physically. 

"  We  tried  marriage  once  on  the  basis  of  husband 
and  wife  being  absolute  strangers  to  each  other 
and  at  cross  purposes.  ...  I  shall  never  try  that 
kind  of  marriage  again.  ...  I  couldn't  be  merely 
your  mistress,  Horace.  I'd  want  you,  and  I'd  want 
you  to  take  me,  all  of  me.  I'd  want  it  to  be  our  life 
and  not  merely  an  episode  in  our  life.  Can't  you 
see  what  would  come  afterwards  —  when  you  had 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  213 

grown  calm  about  me  —  and  I  about  you  ?  Can't 
you  see  how  you'd  turn  back  to  your  business  and 
prostitute  yourself  for  money,  while  I'd  turn  perhaps 
to  luxury  and  show,  and  prostitute  myself  to  you  for 
the  means  to  exhibit  myself?  Don't  you  see  it  on 
every  side  there  in  New  York  —  the  traffic  in  the 
souls  of  men  and  women  —  viler  than  any  on  the  side 
walks  at  night  —  the  brazen  faces  of  the  men  flaunt 
ing  their  shame,  the  brazen  faces  of  the  women,  the 
so-called  wives,  flaunting  their  shame.  ...  As  strong 
women  as  I,  stronger,  have  been  dragged  down,  no 
human  being  can  resist  the  slow,  insidious  deduction 
of  his  daily  surroundings. 

"  Armstrong  was  expelling  himself  from  his  own 
class  —  into  what  ?  Except  in  finance,  high  finance, 
what  course  was  there  for  him?  He  would  be  like 
a  politician  without  a  party,  like  a  general  without 
an  army,  like  a  preacher  without  a  parish,  like  a  dis 
barred  lawyer.  His  reputation  would  be  gone  — 
for  morality  is  a  relative  word,  and  by  his  conduct  he 
was  convincing  the  only  class  important  to  him  that 
he  had  not  the  morality  of  his  class,  that  he  could 
not  be  trusted  with  its  interests.  Every  one,  every 
race,  every  class,  has  its  own  morality,  its  own  prac 
tical  application  of  the  general  moral  code  to  its  own 
peculiar  needs.  The  class  financier,  in  the  peculiar 
circumstances  surrounding  life  in  the  new  era,  had  its 
code  of  what  was  honest  and  dishonest,  what  respecta 
ble  and  what  disrespectable,  what  loyal  and  what  dis 
loyal.  Under  that  code  his  new  course  was  disloyal, 
disrespectable,  was  positively  dishonest.  It  would 
avail  him  nothing  should  other  classes  vaguely  ap 
prove,  if  his  own  class  condemned  he  was  damned. 


214*  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  This  country  is  full  of  that  kind  of  generosity  now- 
a-days  —  generosity  with  other  people's  money.  The 
women  don't  think  about  that  side  of  it.  ...  They 
think  that  as  pretty  much  everybody's  doing  that 
sort  of  thing  —  everybody,  that  is,  anybody  —  why, 
it  must  be  all  right.  .  .  .  Sometimes  it  seems  to  me 
I'm  a  fool,  a  dumb  one,  to  stick  to  the  old-fashioned 
ways.  Why  be  so  particular  about  not  taking  other 
people's  property  when  they  leave  it  around  and  don't 
look  after  it  themselves,  when  somebody  else'll  take  it 
if  I  don't  —  somebody  who  won't  make  as  good  use 
as  I  would. 

"  '  It  seems  to  me,'  said  she,  '  the  question  always 
is,  Does  this  property  belong  to  me?  and  if  the  answer 
is  No,  then  to  take  it  is  — ' 

"  '  To  steal,'  he  said,  bluntly. 

"  '  It  would  be  dreadful  enough  for  the  intelligent 
and  strong  —  for  men  like  you,  Horace  —  to  take 
from  the  ignorant  and  weak  to  buy  the  necessities 
of  life.  But  to  snatch  bread  and  shelter  and  warmth 
and  education  from  their  fellow-beings  to  buy  van 
ities  —  it  isn't  American  —  it  isn't  decent  —  it  isn't 
brave ! '  " 

There  are  other  passages  that  arc  worth  quoting 
for  various  reasons : 

"  The  stillness  had  the  static  terror  of  a  room 
where  a  soul  is  about  to  enter  or  leave  the  world.  It 
was  not  her  words  and  her  manner  that  moved  him, 
direct  and  convincing  though  they  were;  it  was  the 
far  subtler  revelation  of  her  inmost  self,  and,  through 
that  of  a  whole  vast  area  of  human  nature  which  he 
had  not  believed  to  exist.  Suddenly,  and  with  a  look 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  215 

in  his  eyes  which  had  never  been  there  before,  he 
reached  out  and  took  her  hands. 

"  She  was  an  interesting  and  much-admired  rep 
resentative  of  the  American  woman  who  goes  in  seri 
ously  for  art.  To  go  in  seriously  for  art  does  not 
mean  to  cultivate  one's  sense  of  the  beautiful,  to  learn 
to  discriminate  with  candor  between  good,  not  so 
good,  not  so  bad,  and  bad.  It  means  to  keep  in  touch 
with  the  European  dealers  in  things  artistic,  real  and 
reputed;  to  be  the  first  to  follow  them  when  a  par 
ticular  fad,  having  been  mined  to  its  last  dollar,  they 
and  their  subsidized  critics  and  connoisseurs  come  out 
excitedly  for  some  new  period  of  style  or  school. 

"...  Egotism !  .  .  .  a  mere  word.  It  simply 
means  human  nature  with  the  blinds  up.  We  are  all 
egotistic.  How  is  it  possible  for  us  not  to  be?  Does 
not  the  universe  begin  when  we  are  born  and  end 
when  we  die?  Certainly  you  are  an  egotist.  But 
you  are  very  short-sighted  in  your  egotism,  my 
friend. 

"  .  .  .  A  truly  noble  character  moves  so  tranquilly 
and  unobtrusively  that  it  is  often  unobserved,  perhaps 
rather  taken  for  granted,  unless  a  startling  event 
compels  attention  to  it.  Neva  was  appreciating  her 
father  at  last.  .  .  .  No  human  being  can  live  in  one 
place  for  half  a  century  without  indelibly  impressing 
himself  on  his  surroundings  ...  in  the  very  atmos 
phere  of  the  rooms  that  he  frequented  a  personality 
.  .  .  revealed  itself  altogether  by  example,  not  at  all 
by  precept ;  a  human  being  that  loved  nature  and  his 
fellow-beings,  lived  in  justice  and  mercy." 

It  is  by  occasional  little  quiet,  subtle  touches  like 


216     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

this  that  Mr.  Phillips  reveals  the  other  side  of  him 
self  and  his  theory  of  life,  and  makes  us  realize  that 
New  York  is  not  all  of  America.  If  The  Second 
Generation,  1906,  is  a  big,  a  significant,  and  an  in 
spiring  book,  Light-lingered  Gentry,  1909,  is  on  the 
whole  a  bigger,  a  more  significant,  and  a  more  inspir 
ing  one. 

Mr.  Winter  passes  over  White  Magic  as  "  sim 
ply  an  innocuous  little  love  story  told  with  rather 
more  explosive  violence  than  the  theme  warrants." 

The  book's  publishers  have  different  views.  Ac 
cording  to  them,  Mr.  Phillips  shows  us  in  his  grim, 
humorous  way  some  sketches  of  a  portion  of  society 
life  that  many  people  fail  to  see  the  humor  of  at  all. 

Similarly  with  The  Fashionable  Adventures  of 
Joshua  Craig.  Mr.  Winter  calls  it  a  piece  of 
cheap  caricature.  The  publishers  suggest  that  when 
Margaret  Severance,  reigning  society  beauty  of 
Washington,  marries  her  untamed  Western  poli 
tician,  partly  because  she  can't  help  it,  and  partly 
with  the  idea  of  civilizing  him,  and  quite  unexpectedly 
goes  West  with  him  to  live,  the  denouement,  while  not 
pleasant  from  one  point  of  view,  is  absolutely  true. 
There  is  no  doubt  that  here,  as  elsewhere  at  times, 
Mr.  Phillips'  social  satire  is  both  pointed  and  pitiless. 
It  is  no  more  than  fair  to  suggest  that  as  such  it  is 
on  a  par  with  the  social  commonplaces  of  the  people 
that  he  attacks ;  and  that  to  make  an  attack  of  the 
sort  at  all  effective  at  headquarters,  some  such  vigor 
ous  method  was  necessary  to  prick  the  thick  hides 
and  the  insufferable  self-complacency  of  the  people 
at  whom  the  satire  was  aimed. 

Mr.   Winter   considers    The  Hungry  Heart   like 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  217 

The  Husband's  Story,  one  of  the  two  books  that 
exhibit  Mr.  Phillips'  ripest  powers,  possibly  because 
it  is  conceived  and  executed  more  in  the  conventional 
French  style  and  method  of  the  eternal  triangle, 
than  in  the  manner  that  Mr.  Phillips  has  made  dis 
tinctively  American  and  his  own.  According  to 
Mr.  Winter,  this  book  deserves  high  praise  as  a  piece 
of  careful  construction.  Later  he  proceeds  to 
quarrel  with  the  author  because,  unconventionally,  in 
the  French  sense,  the  husband  takes  his  wife  back 
after  she  has  proved  the  worthlessness  of  the  other 
man. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  this  book  is  one  of  Mr.  Phillips' 
comparative  failures,  because  the  careful  construc 
tion,  which  Mr.  Winter  praises,  cramps  the  author's 
talent  for  large  effects  and  restricts  the  action  of  a 
long  book  to  a  little  rural  world  of  four  characters. 
The  drifting  apart  of  the  husband  and  wife  through 
his  absorption  in  science,  and  his  failure  to  see  that 
she  needs  some  vital  interest  in  her  life  beyond  dress 
and  housekeeping,  is  carefully  worked  out  —  too  care 
fully.  The  reader  is  inclined  to  sympathize  with  the 
wife's  monotony  and  impatience  through  the  early 
part  of  the  book.  The  climax  and  the  reconciliation 
are  admirably  executed.  The  husband,  contrary  to 
Mr.  Winter's  opinion,  is  less  "  a  conventional,  con 
servative  type  "  than  a  man  of  science.  As  such  he 
has  sense  enough  to  see  that  what  has  happened  has 
been  quite  as  much  his  own  fault  as  his  wife's,  and  to 
realize  at  the  end  that  they  have  both  grown  stronger 
and  better  for  the  experience. 

This  book,  while  hardly  fitted  in  itself  to  apprecia 
bly  increase  Mr.  Phillips'  popularity  or  rank  in  the 


218     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

literary  world,  forms  an  interesting  connecting  link 
between  Old  Wives  for  New,  1908,  and  The  Husband's 
Story. 

The  former  book  is  not  a  pleasant  one.  It  is 
frankly  realistic,  at  times  brutally  so.  According  to 
Mr.  Winter,  the  real  importance  of  this  book  is  that 
"  it  sets  forth  quite  pitilessly  the  gradual  estrange 
ment  that  arises  between  a  husband  and  wife  in  the 
course  of  long  years  through  the  woman's  sloth  and 
selfishness  and  gratification  of  all  her  whims.  .  .  . 
What  he  has  done  is  to  show  us  first  in  a  brief  pre 
lude  the  sudden  ardor  of  a  boy-and-girl  attachment, 
each  caught  by  the  mere  physical  charm  of  youth  and 
health  and  high  spirits  and  rushing  into  a  marriage 
with  no  firm  basis  of  mutual  understanding. 

"  Then  he  skips  an  interval  of  about  twenty  years 
and  takes  us  into  the  intimate  life  of  this  same  couple, 
showing  us  with  a  frankness  of  speech  and  of  thought 
that  is  almost  cruel  in  its  unsparing  realism,  the 
physical  and  mental  degeneration  of  the  woman,  fat 
and  old  and  slovenly  before  her  time,  and  the  un 
spoken  repulsion  felt  by  the  man  who  has  kept  himself 
young,  alert  and  thoroughly  modern  in  outward  ap 
pearance  as  well  as  in  spirit. 

"  The  situation  is  complicated  by  the  presence  of 
two  grown  children,  a  son  and  a  daughter,  who  see 
unwillingly  the  approaching  crisis  and  realize  their 
helplessness  to  ward  it  off.  Such  a  situation  in  real 
life  may  solve  itself  in  any  one  of  fifty  different  ways. 

"  What  Mr.  Phillips  has  chosen  to  do  is  to  bring 
the  husband  in  contact  with  a  young  woman  who  rep 
resents  everything  in  which  his  own  wife  is  lacking. 
And  although  the  man  fights  for  a  long  time  against 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  219 

temptation,  in  the  end  he  obtains  freedom  from  the 
old  wife  through  the  divorce  court  and  promptly  re 
places  her  with  the  new. 

"  There  is  probably  no  other  American  novel  that 
gives  us  with  such  direct  and  unflinching  clairvoyance 
the  sordid,  repellent,  intimate  little  details  of  a  mis 
taken  marriage  that  slowly  but  surely  culminates  in 
a  sort  of  physical  nausea  and  an  inevitable  separa 
tion." 

Mr.  Winter  is  inclined  to  feel  that  there  is  a  heart 
less  immorality  in  the  story  of  the  husband's  deliber 
ate  and  unrelenting  progress  towards  freedom. 

Judged  by  the  modern  test,  that  the  difference  be 
tween  morality  and  immorality  is  that  between  con 
struction  and  destruction  of  power,  the  wife  in  ques 
tion  is  quite  as  immoral  as  the  husband,  if  not  more  so. 
Their  eventual  separation,  in  one  way  or  another,  is 
inevitable;  and  here  again  it  is  evident  that  Mr. 
Phillips  has  meant  to  symbolize  by  these  two  charac 
ters  an  increasing  class  of  American  husbands  and 
wives.  Mr.  Phillips  tells  the  story  with  the  terse 
impartiality  of  the  star  reporter  on  a  conservative 
sheet.  He  recognizes  that  certain  causes  produce 
certain  results,  and  that  it  is  his  business  to  make  us 
see  this.  And  he  does  make  us  see  it,  in  this  case  as 
well  as  in  the  case  of  the  husband's  business  associate, 
who  is  murdered  in  a  Tenderloin  resort  as  a  result  of 
a  life  of  periodic  licentiousness,  carefully  calculated 
and*  concealed. 

The  story  of  the  decline  and  fall  of  the  cast-off 
wife  is  focussed  in  two  words:  candy  and  corsets. 
Here  again  one  is  forced  to  realize  that  this  woman 
is  typical  of  a  large  and  increasing  class  of  American 


220     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

women  who  may  be  briefly  characterized  as  home 
breakers  rather  than  home  makers.  When  not  on 
dress  parade,  she  slumps  and  slouches  inevitably. 
She  is  slovenly,  she  is  gluttonous,  she  is  helpless  and 
inert,  in  mind,  body  and  soul. 

When  at  last,  warned  by  threats  of  her  hus 
band's  desertion,  she  rouses  herself  feebly  to  try  to 
win  him  back,  the  account  of  her  own,  her  maid's  and 
her  corsetieres*  maneuvers  with  an  impossible  cage  of 
silk  and  steel  that  is  a  very  straight- j  acket  of  torment 
to  her,  is  at  once  ludicrous  and  tragic.  Perusal  of 
this  part  of  the  book  is  far  from  pleasant :  people  who 
enjoy  the  doubtful  felicity  of  living  in  the  part  of  the 
world  here  portrayed  have  ample  reason  to  know  that 
the  reality  is  still  less  so. 

Old  Wives  for  New  is  Mr.  Phillips'  strongest 
piece  of  realism.  For  concentrated  and  consistent 
power  in  this  respect,  outside  of  Frank  Norris's 
McTeague,  there  is  not  another  American  novel 
to  equal  or  rival  it.  In  many  ways  it  is  a  far  more 
artistic  book,  judged  from  a  purely  literary  stand 
point,  than  may  appear  superficially  on  a  first  or  a 
second  reading.  It  ranks  easily  among  the  three  or 
four  best  and  strongest  of  his  books. 

The  same  may  be  said  of  The  Husband's  Story, 
1910,  though  here  the  realism  is  modified  and  colored 
by  its  telling  in  the  first  person  in  the  mouth  of  a  New 
York  captain  of  industry,  the  father  of  an  American 
duchess,  and  the  former  husband  of  an  Italian  prin 
cess. 

Mr.  Winter  says  of  this  book :  "  A  large  part  of 
the  merit  of  this  undeniably  big  novel  lies  in  what  it 
merely  implies,  instead  of  what  it  says.  To  conceive 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

a  story  of  this  sort  is  something  in  itself  to  be  proud 
of,  but  to  conceive  of  telling  it  through  the  husband's 
lips  was  a  stroke  of  genius.  ...  It  is  a  ruthless  in 
dictment  of  the  unfitness  of  a  certain  type  of  Amer 
ican  woman  to  undertake  the  duties  of  wife  and 
mother  and  housemaker  .  .  .  the  whole  intimate 
drama  of  a  pushing,  climbing  couple,  who  start  from 
sordid  beginnings  in  an  obscure  little  town  in  New 
Jersey  ...  is  given  from  the  husband's  point  of 
view  with  a  grim  and  unsparing  irony." 

Mr.  Winter  thinks  that  the  irony  lies  in  the  hus 
band's  unconscious  portrayal  of  himself.  He  believes 
that  Mr.  Phillips  thought  so  too,  and  considers  this 
a  point  that  few  readers  detect.  He  considers  the 
husband  equally  responsible  with  the  wife  for  the  fail 
ure  of  their  marriage,  and  thinks  this  was  the  impres 
sion  that  Mr.  Phillips  intended  to  convey. 

The  fact  is  that  Edna  Loring  typifies  a  class  of 
American  women  who  have  become  impossible  to  every 
one  who  is  not  content  to  take  them  at  their  own 
valuation,  or  to  pretend  to.  Her  husband  typifies  a 
class  of  American  business  and  professional  men  who 
have  become  guilty,  through  contributory  negligence, 
of  the  supreme  uselessness  and  artificiality  displayed 
by  their  wives  and  daughters,  and  who  are  rapidly 
waking  up  to  the  fact. 

In  this  case  Mr.  Phillips  chooses  to  represent  God 
frey  Loring,  a  man  who  outgrows  his  wife  and  his 
own  early  standards,  who  is  shrewd  enough  to  see 
through  them  both,  who  is  acute  enough  to  realize 
that  anywhere  short  of  a  desert  island  Edna  Loring, 
New  York  society  leader  and  mother  of  her  American 
duchess,  is  hopeless  as  a  life  companion  for  him,  who 


222     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

is  sane  enough  after  this  realization  to  appreciate  the 
advantages  of  a  real  wife  and  a  real  home  and  chil 
dren,  and  who  is  determined  enough,  once  his  wife 
has  given  him  a  legitimate  excuse  for  seeking  them 
elsewhere,  to  hold  her  to  the  bond  of  the  contract  of 
separation  she  has  herself  proposed. 

In  this  section  of  the  book,  before  and  after, 
there  is  abundant  room  for  irony.  Most  of  it,  how 
ever,  is  irony  of  which  the  author,  the  man  who 
tells  the  story,  and  the  average  reader  are  equally 
and  at  once  aware.  It  is  impossible  to  mistake  it  in 
passages  like  the  following: 

"  '  On  the  contrary,'  said  I.  '  You  speak  like  a 
woman  accustomed  to  deal  with  men  according  to  her 
own  good  pleasure.' 

"  '  How  shrewd  that  is,'  said  she,  with  an  admiring 
glance.  *  Plow  shrewd  you  are !  That's  what  I  miss 
in  other  men,  in  these  men  over  here  who  have  so  much 
that  I  admire.  But  they  —  well,  they  give  me  the 
feeling  that  they  are  superficial.  Do  you  think  that 
I  am  superficial?  ' 

"'How  could  I? 'said  I. 

"  '  That's  an  evasion,'  laughed  she ;  '  you  do  think 
so.  And  perhaps  I  am.  A  woman  ought  to  be.  A 
man  looks  after  the  serious  side  of  life.  The  woman's 
side  is  the  lighter  and  graceful  side  —  don't  you  think 
so?' 

"  '  That  sounds  plausible,'  said  I. 

"  '  But  I  grow  tired  of  superficial  men.  They  give 
me  the  feeling  that  —  well,  that  they  couldn't  be  re 
lied  on.  And  you  are  so  reliable,  Godfrey.  I  feel 
about  you  that,  no  matter  what  happened,  you'd  be 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

equal  to  it.  And  that's  why  I  don't  want  to  give 
you  up.' 

"  I  sat  with  my  eyes  down  as  if  I  were  listening  and 
reflecting. 

"  '  Since  you've  been  over  here  long  enough  to  — 
to  broaden  a  little  —  you  don't  mind  my  saying 
you've  broadened  ?  ' 

"  «  It's  true,'  said  I. 

"  '  I've  fancied  perhaps  you  might  be  seeing  that 
I  wasn't  altogether  wrong  in  my  ideas?  ' 

"  '  Yes,'  said  I,  as  she  hesitated. 

"  '  Margot  was  telling  me  about  some  plans  you 
had  for  living,  on  the  other  side.  You  weren't  in 
earnest?  ' 

"  I  looked  at  her  gravely.  '  Very  much  in  earnest,' 
said  I.  *  I  shall  never  again,  in  any  circumstances, 
live  as  we  used  to  live.'  She  sank  back  in  her  chair, 
slowly  turned  her  parasol  round  and  round. 

"  '  Then  it's  hopeless,'  said  she  with  a  sigh  that  was 
a  sob  also.  And  the  look  in  the  eyes  that  she  lifted 
to  mine  went  straight  to  my  heart.  '  I  simply  can't 
stand  America,'  said  she ;  '  it  reminds  me  of  — '  She 
rose  impatiently.  '  If  you  only  knew,  Godfrey,  how 
I  loathe  my  origin  —  the  dreadful  class  we  came  from 
—  the  commonness  of  it ! '  She  shuddered. 

"  '  Europe  is  the  place  for  you,'  said  I." 

In  the  whole  range  of  fiction  there  are  few  scenes, 
few  conversations,  that  compress  so  much  higher  com 
edy  and  tragic  irony  at  once,  into  so  few  words. 

Mr.  Winter  has  tried,  inconclusively,  to  interpret 
The  Husband's  Story  from  a  woman's  point  of 
view.  Later  we  see  what  a  woman  has  to  say  about 


224     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

it.  In  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Times'  Literary  Sup 
plement  for  January  29th,  1911,  Mrs.  Annie  Nathan 
Meyer  declares : 

"  Here  are  three  quotations  from  David  Graham 
Phillips's  latest  novel,  The  Husband's  Story.  I 
could  cull  any  number  like  them.  In  fact,  there  are 
so  many,  and  they  are  so  trenchant,  so  searching,  that 
one  almost  wonders  that  the  shot  which  cut  short  the 
career  of  the  brilliant  author  was  fired  by  a  man : 

" '  Probe  to  the  bottom  of  any  of  the  present-day  activities 
of  the  American  woman  —  I  care  not  what  it  may  be,  church 
or  lecture,  suffrage  movement  or  tenement  reform  —  and  you 
will  discover  the  bacillus  of  society  position  biting  merrily 
away  at  her. 

"'The  cruellest  indictment  of  the  intellect  of  woman  is  the 
crude,  archaic,  futile,  and  unimaginative  way  in  which  is  car 
ried  on  the  part  of  life  that  is  woman's  peculiar  work  —  or, 
rather,  is  messed,  muddled,  slopped,  and  neglected. 

" '  It  may  be  that  woman  will  some  day  develop  another  and 
higher  sphere  for  herself.  But  first  she  would  do  well  to 
learn  to  fill  the  sphere  she  now  rattles  round  in,  like  one  dry 
pea  in  a  ten-gallon  can.' 

"  How  the  American  woman  is  taking  what  is  to 
me  the  most  poignant  arraignment  of  her  that  has  yet 
appeared  I  do  not  know.  Private  mutterings  of 
wrath  I  have  heard,  but  no  more.  .  .  .  Unfaltering, 
mercilessly,  Mr.  Phillips  has  exposed  the  absurd  pre- 
tentions  of  the  American  woman.  His  heroine  and 
her  kind  are  held  up  as  bungling  housekeepers,  callous 
seekers  after  their  own  pleasure,  ignorant  mothers, 
slave-drivers  to  their  good-natured,  indifferent, 
woman-worshiping,  woman-despising,  money-making 
husbands.  Furthermore,  they  are  empty-headed  and 
frivolous,  both  vain  and  colossally  conceited.  Of 
course,  it  is  easy  to  call  names.  But  Mr.  Phillips 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  225 

does  much  more  than  that :  he  gives  us  a  living,  breath 
ing  woman,  clean-cut  in  outline,  yet  amazingly  subtle. 
He  is  not  content,  for  instance,  with  painting  his 
heroine  as  lazy,  for  the  American  woman  is  anything 
but  lazy.  He  is  penetrating  enough  to  know  that 
she  is  lazy  only  where  she  is  indifferent.  He  does  not 
paint  her  as  hopelessly  stupid,  for  he  knows  that  in 
her  own  little  line  of  social  activities  she  is  a  general 
—  Napoleonic  even  if  Lilliputian.  How  well  he  hits 
the  nail  on  the  head : 

" '  It  was  impossible  to  interest  her  in  anything  worth  while. 
But  as  to  the  things  in  which  she  was  interested,  none  could 
have  thought  more  clearly  or  keenly,  or  could  have  acted  with 
more  vigor  and  effect.' 

"  In  nothing  else  does  he  show  better  his  skillful 
handling  of  the  queer  contradictions  of  woman  than 
in  making  his  wife  at  the  beginning  utterly  indifferent 
to  the  food  she  provides  for  the  bread-winner  of  the 
family,  reducing  him  to  the  tender  mercies  of  the 
delicatessen  dealer,  tackling  the  intricate  problems  of 
cooking  with  the  serene  cocksureness  of  complete  ig 
norance,  and  yet  strangely  capable  of  self-denial  and 
a  devoted,  conscientious  study  of  nutriment  for  her 
self  and  daughter  when  she  discovers  that  both  com 
plexion  and  figure  depend  on  it.  ... 

"  In  one  way  the  book  is  peculiarly  impressive.  If 
it  dealt  with  one  stratum  of  society  alone,  it  would  be 
easy  to  let  it  pass  as  an  indictment  of  a  small  number 
of  women  only.  But  the  first  chapter  starts  with  the 
squalor  of  Edna  Wheatlands'  childhood,  shows  her 
jilted  by  an  eight-dollar-a-week  clerk,  takes  her 
through  the  period  of  her  honeymoon  in  the  '  forty- 
dollar  flat,'  gorgeous  with  '  its  brave  show  of  red 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

plush,'  carries  her  along  through  middle-class  gen 
tility,  thence  by  the  leaps  and  bounds  of  a  successful 
business  man  to  the  lower  fringe  of  society,  painfully 
working  up  to  the  upper  crust,  and  finally  bursting 
through  into  the  aristocracy  of  Europe.  And  in 
each  setting  it  is  undeniable  that  the  strictures  on 
the  '  eternal  feminine  '  ring  equally  true. 

"  The  characterization  is  superb.  Difficult  as  it  is, 
he  has  made  us  feel  that  the  slatternly,  down-at-the- 
heels  bride  of  the  early  chapters  is  the  same  woman 
who  later  relentlessly  carves  the  resplendent  future  of 
herself  and  daughter.  The  husband's  cynical  wonder 
at  the  extraordinary  incompetence  of  women  is  the 
same  whether  it  is  aimed  at  the  servantless  mistress 
of  the  stuffy  flat  or  the  elegant  dame  of  the  fashiona 
ble  mansion,  helpless  under  the  sway  of  her  thirty- 
five  minions.  '  A  wife,'  he  cries,  '  no  more  fitted  to  be 
a  wife  than  the  office-boy  is  fitted  to  step  in  and  take 
the  president's  job.' 

"  Into  one  tradition  after  another  he  has  charged 
with  his  gall-steeped  pen.  The  woman  is  no  home- 
maker,  only  a  brazen  schemer  to  achieve  a  more  and 
more  costly  environment  of  discomfort.  She  is  no 
mother;  she  knows  nothing  about  the  real  needs  of 
children,  she  is  keen  only  for  their  world  success. 
She  is  not  the  inspirer  of  her  husband;  she  likes  to 
pose  as  such,  but  she  is  interested  in  his  business  only 
for  what  there  is  in  it  for  her,  and  in  a  crisis  she  is 
the  last  person  to  whom  he  would  appeal  for  comfort, 
idealism,  or  even  plain,  business  honesty. 

"  And,  finally,  he  boasts  that  he  '  has  pricked  the 
bubble  of  the  American  woman's  pretense  of  superior 
culture.'  This  undoubtedly  took  more  courage  than 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  227 

anything  else  he  has  done.  Strangely  enough,  women 
are  not  so  ashamed  to  admit  that  they  are  poor  wives, 
and  worse  mothers ;  but  when  you  take  from  them  the 
glory  of  upholding  the  tradition  of  refinement  and 
culture,  then  the  blow  hurts.  How  he  laughs  at  those 
'  expert  smatterers,'  fi  with  a  little  miseducation  befog 
ging  their  mind.'  But  the  deepest  sting  is  here : 

" '  The  American  woman  fancies  she  is  growing  away  from 
the  American  man.  The  truth  is,  that  while  she  is  sitting 
still,  the  American  man  is  growing  away  from  her.' 

"  Of  course,  as  I  intimated  at  the  beginning,  this  is 
not  pleasant  reading  for  smug  women,  bursting  with 
self-praise  and  scorn  of  the  other  sex.  It  is  cer 
tainly  much  pleasanter  to  be  assured  (as  they  will  find 
plenty  of  books  to  assure  them)  that  the  American 
women  are  the  most  wonderful  women  in  the  world, 
than  to  be  told  the  plain  truth  that  they  are  the  most 
spoiled,  the  most  incompetent  in  the  things  that 
count,  and  the  hardest  on  their  husbands,  demanding 
more  and  giving  less  than  any  other  women  in  the 
world." 

These  are  the  views  of  a  woman  that  is  well  known 
in  New  York,  as  an  anti-woman-suffragist  and  edu 
cator  of  prominence. 

Granting  that  the  type  of  woman  against  which 
Mrs.  Meyer  fulminates  is  at  least  a  little  more  com 
mon  in  various  classes  of  American  society  than  Mr. 
Winter  would  like  to  believe,  we  may  remark  that 
Godfrey  Loring  finds,  at  last,  one  woman  in  his  own 
class,  and  Edna's,  who  is  in  all  essentials  an  antithesis 
to  his  first  wife. 


228     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Mary  Kirkwood  has  been  married  before,  and  di 
vorced  as  well,  through  no  fault  of  her  own  other  than 
the  ignorance  of  a  child.  She  considers  herself  a  nor 
mal  woman.  She  lets  Loring  know  while  they  are  still 
friends,  and  after  he  has  told  her  that  he  thinks  he 
makes  money  for  the  same  reason  that  a  hen  lays 
eggs  or  a  cow  gives  milk,  because  it  is  his  natural 
function,  that  what  she  wants  most  in  the  world  is 
love  and  children. 

"  I  am  thinking  of  selecting  some  trustworthy  man 
with  good  physical  and  mental  qualities.  I  have  had 
experience.  I  ought  to  be  able  to  judge  —  and  not 
being  in  love  with  him,  I  shall  not  be  so  likely  to  make 
a  mistake.  I  shall  marry  and  the  children  will  give 
me  love  and  occupation.  You  may  laugh,  but  I  tell 
you  that  the  only  occupation  worthy  of  a  man  or  a 
woman  is  bringing  up  children.  All  the  rest  —  for 
men  as  well  as  for  women  —  is  —  is  like  a  hen  laying 
eggs  to  rot  in  the  weeds.  .  .  .  Bringing  up  children 
to  develop  us,  to  give  us  a  chance  to  make  them  an 
improvement  on  our  own  lives.  That's  the  best." 

None  the  less,  Mrs.  Kirkwood  is  sufficiently  suscep 
tible  to  the  traditions  of  her  environment  to  become 
engaged  to  a  German  Count  some  time  after  this, 
and  the  interest  of  the  story  is  thus  sustained  to  the 
last  chapter. 

There  are  few  works  of  fiction  so  eminently  quot 
able  in  the  form  of  truth  that  is  not  merely  contem 
porary  but  universal.  There  is  hardly  a  page  with 
out  a  paragraph  or  sentence  that  challenges 
consideration  in  this  way. 

Mrs.  Meyer  has  very  vigorously  demonstrated  the 
most  obvious  and  purposeful  side  of  the  book  from  her 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  229 

point  of  view.  A  few  more  characteristic  touches  re 
main  to  be  added,  however. 

"  The  dear  child  has  been  elected  to  the  most  ex 
clusive  fraternity  (sorority).  Every  girl  in  it  has  to 
wear  hand-made  underclothes  and  has  to  have  at  least 
a  father,  or  a  grandfather,  and  a  great-grandfather. 
.  .  .  You  know  all  the  genealogies  are  more  or  less 
faked,  and  I've  no  doubt  hers  is  every  bit  as  genuine 
as  those  of  half  the  girls.  .  .  .  Are  the  hand-made 
underclothes  faked  too?  .  .  .  Oh,  no.  They  had  to 
be  genuine.  I've  never  let  Margot  wear  any  other 
kind  since  I  learned  about  these  things. 

"  There's  nothing  that  gives  a  girl  such  a  sense  of 
lady-likeness  and  superiority  as  to  feel  that  she's 
dressed  right  from  the  skin  out. 

"  '  She's  the  most  conspicuous  female  in  sight,'  said 
I.  «  She's  a  credit  to  us.' 

"  American  husbands  have  the  reputation  of  being 
the  most  docile  and  the  most  henpecked  men  in  the 
world.  All  foreigners  say  so,  and  our  women  believe 
it.  In  fact,  nothing  could  be  farther  from  the  truth. 
The  docility  of  American  husbands  is  the  good  nature 
of  indifference. 

"  The  fact  is,  my  dear,  people  are  all  tiresome. 
That's  why  they  can't  amuse  themselves  or  each  other, 
but  have  to  be  amused  —  have  to  hire  the  clever  peo 
ple  of  all  sorts  to  entertain  them.  Instead  of  asking 
people  here  to  bore  us  and  be  bored,  why  not  send 
them  seats  at  a  theater,  or  orders  for  a  first-class  meal 
at  a  first-class  restaurant? 

"  I  made  inquiries  into  how  their  wives  spent  the 
money  that  went  for  food  —  the  most  important  item 
in  the  spending  of  incomes  under  ten  or  twelve  thou- 


230     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

sand  a  year.  In  every  case  the  wife  or  the  mother 
did  the  marketing  by  telephone.  All  the  men  except 
one  took  the  ignorance  and  incompetence  of  the  man 
agement  of  the  household  expenses  as  a  matter  of 
course. 

"  I  had  not  then  waked  up  to  the  fact  that  as  a  rule 
women  systematically  lie  to  their  husbands  about  big 
things  and  little,  and  that  those  women  who  profess 
to  be  too  proud  to  lie,  do  their  lying  by  indirections, 
such  as  omissions,  half-truths,  and  misleading  silences 
.  .  .  those  of  them  who  profess  to  be  the  proudest  are 
either  the  most  ignorant  of  themselves  or  the  most 
hypocritical. 

"  Another  mistake  I  made  —  the  initial  mistake 
was  in  giving  her  a  fortune  .  .  .  there's  something 
worse  than  the  more  or  less  sentimental  aversion  to 
being  loved  and  considered  merely  for  the  money  they 
can  get  out  of  you,  and  can't  get  without  you.  .  .  . 
It's  worse  to  give  a  foolish  woman  the  power  to  make 
a  fool  of  herself,  of  her  children,  and  of  you. 

"  Margot  rather  liked  me  I  believe.  Not  as  a 
father.  As  a  father  I  made  her  ashamed  like  every 
thing  else  American  about  her.  Men  are  habitu 
ally  fools  about  women  —  not  because  women  make 
fools  of  them,  but  because  they  enjoy  the  sensation 
of  making  fools  of  themselves.  This  is  a  sensation 
much  praised  by  poets,  romancers,  sentimentalists  of 
all  kinds.  .  .  .  Men  have  flung  away  their  fortunes, 
their  lives  for  the  sake  of  a  pose ;  martyrs  have  been 
burned  at  the  stake  for  pose." 

There  are  a  few  axioms  of  Mr.  Phillips'  philoso 
phy  in  this  book  that  do  riot  bear  directly  on  the 
question  of  marriage: 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

"  It  is  the  instinct  of  big  men  to  be  big  and  simple 
and  natural  in  their  dealings  with  their  fellows. 
The  mass  of  little  men  with  big  vanities  compels  them 
to  suppress  this  instinct.  ...  Be  polite  to  a  man  and 
he  will  misunderstand.  Be  cool  to  him,  and  he, 
thickly  enveloped  in  his  own  good  opinion  of  himself, 
will  not  feel  it.  Rudeness,  overt  and  unmistakable,  is 
often  the  one  way  to  reach  him  and  to  save  not  only 
yourself  but  him  from  the  consequences  of  his  own 
vanity. 

"  I  don't  ask  advice  to  have  someone  to  blame  if 
things  go  wrong. 

"  No  one  who  has  not  the  faculty  of  analysis  ever 
gets  anywhere;  no  one  who  has  that  faculty  ever 
escapes  the  charge  of  cynicism. 

"  To  the  man  of  large  affairs,  the  average  .  .  . 
biography  or  novel  about  a  great  man  reads  like  the 
attempt  of  a  straddle-bug  to  give  his  fellow  straddle- 
bugs  an  account  of  an  elephant. 

"  Of  all  its  stupidities  and  follies  none  so  com 
pletely  convicts  the  human  race  of  shallowness  and 
bad  taste  as  its  notions  of  what  is  romantic  and  ideal 
istic.  The  more  elegant  the  human  animal  flatters 
itself  it  is,  the  poorer  are  its  ideals  —  that  it  is  the 
farther  removed  from  the  practical  and  the  useful. 

"  A  fool  is  a  grown  person  who  has  never  grown  up. 

"  To  be  regarded  as  thoroughly  sane  and  sensible, 
you  must  be  careful  to  be  neither,  but  to  pattern  your 
self  painstakingly  upon  the  particular  form  of  feeble 
mindedness  and  conventional  silliness  current  in  your 
time. 

"  I  don't  see  that  it  takes  any  more  brains  or  any 
better  brains  to  paint  a  picture  or  sing  a  song  or 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

write  a  novel,  than  it  does  to  run  a  railroad  —  or  to 
plan  one.  If  you'd  try  to  understand  business  .  .  . 
you  might  find  it  as  interesting  and  as  intellectual  as 
anything  that  doesn't  help  us  to  make  a  living. 

"  I  am  a  business  man,  not  a  smug,  shallow-pated 
failure  teaching  an  antiquated  college.  I  abhor  the 
word  culture  as  I  abhor  the  word  gentleman  or  the 
word  lady,  because  of  the  company  into  which  it  has 
fallen. 

"  Material  conditions  force  upon  men  inexorable 
modes  of  life.  And  every  mode  of  life  breeds  a 
definite,  distinct  set  of  ideas.  ...  I  saw  that  he  had 
even  reached  the  pose  where  a  man  of  property  re 
gards  a  new  idea  as  a  menace  to  society.  .  .  .  And 
of  course  when  a  man  speaks  of  a  menace  to  society, 
he  means  a  menace  to  himself. 

"  Little  people  ought  always  to  be  optimistic. 
Then,  their  enthusiasm  —  if  directed  by  some  big  per 
son  —  produces  good  results.  .  .  .  But  big  people 
must  not  be  —  and  are  not  —  optimistic,  whatever 
they  may  pretend.  The  big  man  must  foresee  all  the 
chances  against  success.  Then  .  .  .  the  courage  of 
the  big  man  will  enable  him  to  go  fairly  ahead,  not 
blunderingly,  but  wisely.  The  general  must  be  pessi 
mist.  The  private  must  be  optimist." 

It  is  evident  to  anyone  who  has  read  so  far  that 
Mr.  Phillips'  hero  has  developed  considerably  since  he 
married  the  Paterson  undertaker's  daughter  and 
emerged  from  obscurity.  And  the  fruit  of  his  experi 
ence,  like  his  creator's,  may  be  summed  up  in  a  very 
few  words : 

"As  we  grow  older  and  rise  in  the  world,  there  is 
always  a  deterioration  both  in  disposition  and  char- 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  233 

acter.  A  man's  disposition  grows  sharper  through 
dealing  with,  and  having  to  deal  sharply  with,  incom- 
petency.  The  character  tends  to  harden  as  he  is 
forced  to  make  the  unpleasant  and  often  not  too  scru 
pulous  moves  necessary  to  getting  himself  forward 
towards  success  .  .  .  but  the  whole  object  in  having 
a  home,  a  wife,  a  family,  is  defeated  if  the  man  has 
not  there  a  something  that  checks  the  tendencies 
towards  cynicism  and  coldness,  which  active  life  not 
merely  encourages  but  compels. 

"  Friendship  is  divine,  but  intimacy  is  the  devil  him 
self  —  unless  it  is  the  intimacy  of  the  family.  To 
love  your  neighbor  as  yourself,  he  must  be  and  must 
remain  your  neighbor;  that  is  to  say,  within  hail  but 
not  within  touch.  Husband,  wife,  and  children  are 
the  only  natural  intimates  —  intimate  because  they 
have  the  bond  of  common  interest.  The  family  that 
looks  abroad  for  intimates  has  ceased  to  be  a  family. 
A  man  who  has  his  wife  and  children  for  intimates  has 
neither  time  nor  need  for  other  intimates ;  and  unless 
a  man's  wife  and  children  are  his  intimates,  he  has,  in 
fact,  no  wife  and  no  children. 

"  My  theory,  or  rather  my  philosophy  —  for  it  is 
more  than  a  theory  —  my  philosophy  is  that  the  fam 
ily  is  the  unit  of  happiness." 

in. 

It  is  this  same  philosophy  that  The  Grain  of  Dust, 
1911,  helps  to  exemplify. 

The  sale  of  this  novel,  published  as  a  serial  in  The 
Saturday  Evening  Post  at  the  time  of  the  author's 
death,  already  threatens  to  equal  or  exceed  that  of 
any  of  Mr.  Phillips'  former  works.  Dramatized  by 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Louis  Evan  Shipman,  its  success  as  a  play  in  Chicago 
has  been  immediate  and  meteoric. 

Save  The  Worth  of  a  Woman,  Mr.  Phillips  has 
never  written  anything  that  appeals  more  directly  and 
dramatically  to  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  Americans 
of  both  sexes  than  this  story  of  a  New  York  corpora 
tion  lawyer  who  comes  within  an  ace  of  wrecking  him 
self  hopelessly  through  his  infatuation  for  a  stenog 
rapher  in  his  own  office,  and  who  "  comes  back  "  after 
his  long  deferred  marriage  to  her  with  increased  power 
and  usefulness  in  both  harsher  and  more  humane  busi 
ness  and  social  relations. 

Opinions,  critical  and  commonplace,  may  vary  con 
siderably  about  the  character  of  Frederic  Norman, 
and  the  possible  exaggeration  of  the  faults  and  virtues 
of  the  type  that  Mr.  Phillips  has  focussed  in  this  ex 
tremely  interesting  and  individualized  American. 

There  can  be  but  one  verdict,  however,  as  to  the  au 
thor's  success  with  Dorothy  Hallowell.  In  all  his 
long  gallery  of  American  women  of  to-day  she  shines 
supreme.  It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  in  all 
American  fiction  since  Hester  Prynne  there  are  few 
women  in  the  same  class  with  her  as  a  masterly  exam 
ple  of  character-drawing,  reflecting  perfectly  the  en 
vironment  of  which  she  is  herself  a  part. 

One  may  go  further  and  suggest  that,  as  a  literary 
creation,  she  challenges  comparison  with  Becky  Sharp 
and  the  best  of  Balzac's  women,  or  those  of  any  nov 
elist  with  whom  accurate  fidelity  to  life  is  the  first  and 
the  final  motive  and  accomplishment. 

Almost  equally  admirable  are  the  character-draw 
ings  of  Norman's  sister  and  his  fiancee  in  his  own  class 
at  the  beginning  of  the  story.  The  men  in  the  book, 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  235 

with  the  exception  of  Norman  himself  —  Dorothy's 
father,  who  bears  a  striking  resemblance  to  the  father 
of  Neva  Armstrong  in  Light-Fingered  Gentry,  and 
Fred  Tetlow,  Norman's  partner  and  financial  lifeline 
—  are  little  more  than  sharply  delineated  figures  in 
the  background  or  middle  distance.  Tetlow,  like 
Dorothy,  is  wonderfully  human,  and  an  admirable 
example  of  the  pressure  of  Broadway  and  Wall  Street 
environment  upon  human  material  commonplace  in  its 
strength  and  weakness  to-day. 

Just  how  far  or  how  much  Mr.  Phillips  intended  to 
symbolize  in  him,  in  Norman,  in  the  women  of  Nor 
man's  class,  in  Dorothy  and  her  father,  does  not  con 
cern  us  intimately  at  present.  The  story  as  a  story 
stands  by  itself.  As  such  it  is  Mr.  Phillips'  most  fas 
cinating  and  brilliant  effort  since  The  Great  God  Suc 
cess.  At  the  same  time,  in  common  with  Old  Wives 
for  New  and  The  Husband's  Story,  it  affords  an  ade 
quate  vehicle  for  the  diffusion  of  the  author's  ideas 
of  human  nature  under  pressure  in  New  York  and 
elsewhere  in  Twentieth  Century  America. 

With  the  single  exception  of  The  Husband's  Story, 
it  is  quite  as  quotable  from  cover  to  cover  as  any  of 
Mr.  Phillips'  novels.  Space  is  lacking  for  any  ade 
quate  transcription  of  Mr.  Phillips'  facts  that  hit  one 
between  the  eyes  and  get  into  one's  gray  matter  to 
stay.  A  few  of  these  facts,  however,  may  be  in 
stanced  : 

"  Some  men  .  .  .  never  realize  that  their  rare  pas 
sions  working  upon  the  universal  human  love  of  the 
mysterious,  are  wholly  responsible  for  the  cult  of 
women,  the  sphynx  and  the  sibyl.  But  the  men  .  .  . 
have  been  let  by  them  into  their  ultimate  secret  —  the 


236     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

simple  humanness  of  women ;  the  clap-trappery  of  the 
oracles,  miracles  and  wonders.  He  had  discovered 
that  the  '  divine  intuitions  '  were  mere  shrewd  guesses 
where  they  had  any  meaning  at  all ;  that  her  eloquent 
silences  were  screens  for  ignorance  or  boredom  —  and 
so  on  through  the  list  of  the  legends  that  prop  the 
feminist  cult  .  .  .  '  besides,  a  love  marriage  that 
fails  is  different  from  a  mercenary  marriage  that 
fails.'  *  Very  —  very,'  agreed  he.  '  Just  the  differ 
ence  between  an  honorable  and  a  dishonorable  bank 
ruptcy.' 

"  As  we  grow  older,  what  we  are  inside,  the  kind  of 
thoughts  we  admit  as  our  intimates,  appears  ever  more 
strongly  in  the  countenance  .  .  .  the  look  of  respect 
ability,  of  intellectual  distinction  becomes  a  thinner 
and  ever  thinner  veneer  over  the  selfishness  and  greedi 
ness,  the  vanity  and  the  sensuality  and  falsehood. 
.  .  .  Evidently  Hallowell  during  most  of  his  sixty- 
five  years  had  lived  the  purely  intellectual  life.  The 
result  was  a  look  of  spiritual  beauty,  the  look  of  the 
soul  living  in  the  high  mountain,  with  sincerity  and 
vast  views  continually  before  him.  Such  a  face  fills 
with  awe  the  ordinary  follower  of  the  petty  life  of  the 
world  if  he  have  the  brains  to  know  or  suspect  the  ulti 
mate  truth  about  existence.  It  filled  Norman  with 
awe. 

"...  The  Martin  is  gay  enough.  The  truth  is, 
there's  nothing  really  gay  any  more.  There's  too 
much  money.  Money  suffocates  gayety.  .  .  . 

"  I  don't  know  anything  worth  knowing  except  how 
to  dress  and  make  a  fool  of  an  occasional  man.  I'm 
not  a  housekeeper  nor  a  good  wife  —  and  I'd  as  lief 
go  to  jail  for  two  years  as  to  have  a  baby.  But  I  ad- 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  237 

mit  that  I'm  n.  g.    Most  women  are  as  poor  excuses  as 
I  am,  yet  they  think  they  are  grand. 

"  A  man's  home  ought  to  be  a  retreat,  not  an  inn. 
.  .  .  Of  the  girls  growing  up  nowadays  very  few  are 
fit  to  be  American  wives.  They're  not  big  enough. 
They're  only  fit  for  the  shallow,  showy  sort  of  thing  — 
and  the  European  aristocracy  is  their  hope  and  their 
place." 

The  Grain  of  Dust  is  a  big  book,  a  true  book,  a 
brilliant  exemplification  and  argument  of  the  author's 
Americanism ;  at  the  same  time,  treated  as  literature 
simply  and  severely,  it  is  literature  of  a  very  high 
order  of  distinction  and  lasting  value. 

Beside  it  The  Conflict,  1911,  judged  as  liter 
ature  and  a  contemporary  document  of  wide  human 
appeal  and  assisting  human  interest,  is  inconsiderable. 
As  a  sociological  tract,  where  the  author,  violating 
his  own  published  creed  of  an  impartial  interpreter 
of  life  as  he  sees  it,  preached  flatfooted  Socialism  in  ; 
everything  but  the  name,  it  reminds  us  uninspiringly 
of  the  later  literary  failures  of  Zola  and  Tolstoy.  J 

The  old  sincerity  is  there  still.  The  old  dexterity 
in  adapting  situations  and  evolving  characters  to 
voice  the  author's  views  is  still  apparent.  The  old 
shrewdness  and  directness  in  unmasking  the  social 
and  political  shams  of  America  in  the  making  may 
stimulate  and  divert  us  by  the  way. 

But  at  the  end  of  the  long  journey  of  nearly  four 
hundred  close  pages,  we  find  ourselves,  if  we  reach  the 
end  at  all,  at  practically  the  same  place  where  we 
started  from  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  book;  and 
there  is  a  disposition  to  ask  ourselves  whether  the  au 
thor  has  not  wasted  his  time  and  our  own. 


238     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

As  a  piece  of  special  pleading,  his  apparent  intol 
erance  of  every  phase  of  modern  life,  save  those  rep 
resented  directly  by  the  work  of  scientists  and  the 
manual  labor  that  he  tends  to  deify,  defeats  itself; 
and  to  any  candid  mind,  disposed  to  accept  gradually 
the  sort  of  Socialism  that  evolves  and  proves  its  fit 
ness  to  survive  and  to  adapt  itself  to  Twentieth  Cen 
tury  conditions,  Mr.  Phillips'  social  criticism  and 
philosophy,  as  voiced  in  The  Conflict,  displays  itself 
as  far  more  destructive  than  constructive;  far  more 
characteristic  of  the  intolerant  and  unbalanced  fa 
natic  than  of  the  shrewd  and  penetrating  critic  and 
interpreter  of  life  that  he  has  proved  himself  in  the 
best  of  his  earlier  books. 

Characters  as  pronounced  as  that  of  David  Gra 
ham  Phillips  are  certain  to  have  the  defects  of  their 
qualities.  The  man's  characteristic  and  intense 
hatred  of  injustice,  snobbery,  pretentiousness,  cru 
elty  and  falsehood  was  ingrained  in  the  very  fiber  of 
him  and  was  inevitably  constrained  to  color  every 
thing  that  he  wrote. 

If  in  The  Conflict,  whose  keynote  is  "  Civilization 
means  property  as  yet.  And  it  doesn't  mean 
men  and  women  as  yet.  So  to  know  the  men  and  the 
women  we  look  at  the  property  " ;  the  author's  sin 
cere  and  militant  passion  on  behalf  of  the  fundamen 
tal  human  rights  and  the  Square  Deal  for  those  who 
are  farthest  from  it,  has  led  him  to  overstate  his  case. 
No  such  fault  can  be  found  with  George  Helm,  1912, 
first  published  as  a  series  of  short  stories  in  The 
Cosmopolitan. 

The  following  extract  from  the  publisher's  an 
nouncement  is  sufficiently  to  the  point :  "  The  book 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  239 

is,  on  the  whole,  quite  up  to  Mr.  Phillips'  higher 
level. 

George  Helm  is  the  novelization  of  a  man  of 
Lincoln's  type.  A  politician  with  a  dangerous,  in 
curable  hankering  to  be  a  man,  self-owned  and  self- 
bossed  —  a  speaker  who  inspires  his  followers  with  a 
passionate  loyalty  —  the  greatest  force  in  the  world 
of  action." 

The  Price  She  Paid,  1912,  is  the  story  of  an 
American  girl  who  raises  herself  from  fashionable  ob 
scurity  to  success  as  a  singer  of  grand  opera  in  the 
high  places  where  sex  and  the  world's  applause  are 
mere  incidents  in  the  day's  work.  It  is  a  modern  ver 
sion,  intensely  interesting  and  readable  from  cover 
to  cover,  of  "  many  are  called,  but  few  are  chosen  " — 
and  fewer  still  choose  and  sustain  themselves. 

Mildred  Gower  of  Hanging  Rock,  near  New  York, 
is  forced  at  the  age  of  twenty-five,  through  financial 
losses  in  her  own  family  and  the  pressure  of  environ 
ment,  to  marry  for  money. 

Her  father-in-law,  who  takes  the  case  in  hand,  pro 
duces  at  the  psychologic  moment  a  peculiarly  per 
nicious  specimen  of  egotist  and  multi-millionaire,  who 
manages  to  repress  some  of  the  hardest  and  crudest 
manifestations  of  his  ego  till  about  a  month  after 
the  marriage  ceremony. 

By  this  time  Mildred's  small  remaining  supply  of 
her  own  money  is  exhausted,  and  she  discovers  that 
she  is  up  against  a  system  practiced  by  very  rich 
men  towards  their  wives  more  commonly  than  is 
often  admitted:  that  of  giving  them  unlimited  credit 
everywhere  (within  certain  restrictions)  and  no  cash 
at  all  in  hand,  or  next  to  none. 


240     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Mildred  objects  strenuously.  She  talks  to  the 
General's  factotum  before  appealing  to  her  buyer 
himself. 

Both  interviews  proving  profitless,  she  leaves  her 
hotel  in  Paris  with  the  understanding  that  once  she 
sets  foot  outside  Bill  Siddall's  door  she  shall  never  set 
foot  inside  it  again. 

She  manages  to  sell  a  gold-net  hand-bag  for  a 
fraction  of  its  former  value,  and  on  the  steamer  back 
to  New  York  she  meets  a  former  millionaire  admirer 
of  hers  who  is  about  to  be  divorced  and  who  at  first 
is  in  mortal  terror  lest  his  wife  and  her  lawyer  should 
hear  of  his  meeting  with  Mildred. 

They  have  sailed  from  a  Southern  Mediterranean 
port,  and  no  one  on  board  seems  to  know  them  or 
to  have  heard  of  them.  Stanley  Baird  offers  to  grub 
stake  her  while  she  studies  for  her  grand  opera  ca 
reer,  at  the  rate  of  five  thousand  a  year  at  six  per 
cent,  interest,  till  she  is  prepared  to  pay  his  money 
back. 

Mildred  accepts ;  she  becomes  a  pupil  of  the  most 
fashionable  and  expensive  teacher  of  singing  in  New 
York ;  Baird  disappears  for  the  time  being ;  she  finds 
refuge  from  General  Siddall's  detectives  and  a  home 
in  the  flat  of  Cyrilla  Brindley,  the  widow  of  a  pro 
fessional  musician  and  a  musician  herself;  she  has  a 
good,  natural  voice,  not  yet  spoiled  by  incompetent 
teaching  and  practice  as  a  fashionable  amateur;  and 
for  nearly  a  year  she  deludes  herself  (and  is  encour 
aged  in  the  belief  by  her  teacher,  Eugene  Jennings, 
who  has  a  genius  for  making  the  goose  that  lays  the 
golden  eggs  lay  as  many  as  possible)  into  the  frame 
of  mind  which  assumes  that  she  is  making  satisfactory 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

and  substantial  progress  when  various  details  of 
health,  temperament  and  bank  account  suggest  the 
exact  opposite. 

Baird  gets  his  divorce,  comes  back  before  the  fol 
lowing  summer  is  over,  and  after  the  exercise  of  con 
siderable  delicacy  and  self-restraint  for  some  time, 
begins  to  make  violent  love  to  her. 

Mildred  develops  colds,  complicated  with  indiges 
tion,  partly  as  a  result  of  late  hours  and  too  many 
cocktails  and  cigarettes. 

At  the  summer-place  where  Baird  finds  her  and 
Mrs.  Brindley,  she  becomes  acquainted  with  Donald 
Keith,  a  New  York  lawyer,  who  generally  contents 
himself  with  taking  over  other  lawyers'  hardest  cases 
and  making  only  twenty  or  thirty  thousand  a  year 
when  he  might  easily  make  ten  times  as  much. 

Keith  regards  her  first  with  much  the  same  lack  of 
interest  that  he  displays  towards  most  things  in  the 
summer  colony. 

Mildred  is  drawn  to  him  by  the  man's  atmosphere 
of  power ;  she  is  piqued  by  his  real  or  apparent  indif 
ference  and  makes  desperate  efforts  to  break  the  ice 
of  his  reserve. 

Keith,  whose  mother  has  been  a  great  opera-singer 
in  her  time,  finally  shows  Mildred  what  a  fool  and 
fraud  she  is ;  how  little  there  is  for  her  to  pride  her 
self  upon  in  her  willingness  to  take  everything  from 
Baird  and  give  nothing,  on  the  bare  chance  that  some 
day  she  may  be  able  to  pay  his  money  back  with  inter 
est  if  she  makes  good.  He  rubs  in  the  fact  that  the 
reason  her  voice  cannot  be  depended  upon  is  nothing 
more  or  less  than  the  result  of  physical  and  moral 
self-indulgence.  He  tells  her  that  sooner  or  later  the 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

time  will  come  when  she  must  rely  on  herself  and  no 
one  else,  or  go  to  the  wall. 

She  wants  to  rely  on  him.  He  will  not  let  her. 
He  informs  her  that  her  husband  is  a  bigamist.  He 
presides  at  a  brief  interview  in  which  Bill  Siddall  is 
sent  definitely  about  his  business. 

He  gives  her  a  paper  embodying  a  Spartan  regime 
of  daily  and  nightly  discipline  endured  successfully 
by  his  mother  for  years ;  and  a  stormy  interview  with 
him  is  followed  by  a  still  more  stormy  interview  with 
Baird. 

Something  inside  herself  that  she  can  neither  under 
stand  nor  withstand  forces  her  to  refuse  to  marry 
the  latter. 

She  goes  back  to  New  York  in  the  fall  with  im 
paired  health  and  a  rapidly  diminishing  bank  ac 
count. 

She  goes  back  to  her  first  landlady  there,  Agnes 
Belloc,  who  has  since  graduated  from  Bohemia  to  re 
spectability,  and  whose  warm  humanity  and  hard  New 
England  common  sense  give  Mildred  sufficient  courage 
and  capacity  to  enable  her  to  make  a  strong  bid  for 
success  as  a  comic  opera  star. 

Crossley,  the  producer,  and  Ransdell,  his  right- 
hand  man,  are  up  a  tree  when  she  appears.  They 
put  her  in  rehearsal  to  be  used  as  a  temporary  stop 
gap,  and  find  that  she  promises  to  score  a  hit. 

All  goes  well  till  Ransdell  starts  to  make  love  to 
her.  As  she  won't  give  him  what  he  wants,  he  be 
gins  to  break  her,  just  as  he  has  made  her. 

Mildred's  nervousness  and  throat  complications  re 
turn  and  she  is  laid  off.  She  forces  herself  to  try  to 
get  to  Crossley  and  lay  the  truth  before  him,  less  with 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  243 

hope  of  reinstatement  than  as  a  mere  matter  of  jus 
tice. 

Crossley  tells  her  to  come  back  later  if  she  can  ever 
trust  her  voice.  She  goes  to  see  Moldini,  the  accom 
panist  in  the  theater,  who  had  helped  her  to  make 
good  at  her  first  appearance,  and  tells  him  that  her 
voice  is  gone  or  going. 

He  tests  her,  and  tells  her  that  there  is  hope.  She 
shows  him  Keith's  mother's  regime,  and  they  begin 
laboriously  to  work  it  out. 

The  last  twenty  pages  of  the  book  are  devoted  to  a 
brief  and  dramatic  account  of  Keith's  final  interview 
with  her,  and  a  still  briefer  notice  of  the  night  that 
she  set  New  York  mad  over  the  birth  of  a  new  lyric 
soprano  star  of  the  first  magnitude. 

From  the  first  she  has  been  in  love  with  Keith.  He 
knows  it  and  loves  her  in  his  own  way.  He  tells  her 
to  do  her  best  to  succeed,  and  if  she  fails  —  but  only 
if  she  fails  after  making  her  utmost  effort  —  to  come 
back  to  him. 

He  comes  to  her  and  makes  this  plain  while  the  cer 
tainty  of  success  is  being  born  in  her  through  Mol- 
dini's  training,  his  mother's  regime  and  something  in 
herself  that  she  cannot  yet  learn  to  understand  or 
control,  which  forces  her  to  go  on  and  live  a  life 
which  she  still  loathes. 

Keith  gets  his  sentence  and  goes  away.  She  slaves 
on  for  more  than  a  year.  For  more  than  a  year  she 
lives  singing;  eats  it;  drinks  it;  breathes,  drives, 
walks,  sleeps,  studies  and  detests  it ;  and  begins  to 
love  it  at  last. 

Then,  as  before,  she  unexpectedly  gets  her  chance 
to  substitute.  This  time  she  is  ready,  and  she  begins 


244     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

to  make  good.  She  realizes  that  her  debut  is  at  best 
a  new  beginning,  that  the  great  fear  of  all  is  lest  she 
should  fail  to  hold  success  once  she  has  grasped  it. 

She  realizes  more  than  this  that  lasting  success  in 
grand  opera,  in  all  the  arts,  in  all  life,  is  built  up  on 
common  sense  and  self-denial  in  the  most  commonplace 
and  prosaic  details  of  every  day  or  night  we  live  or 
pretend  to  live,  fail  or  conquer,  or  compromise  with 
life. 

Mildred  Gower,  like  the  other  characters  in  the 
book,  does  not  cover  the  whole  ground ;  she  does  not 
answer  every  demand ;  she  does  not  solve  or  throw 
light  upon  every  problem  of  the  women  with  careers 
and  without  them,  in  New  York  and  elsewhere,  of 
whom  and  for  whom  Mr.  Phillips  wrote. 

At  the  same  time,  she  comes  nearer  perhaps  to  do 
ing  all  this  than  any  character  in  any  twentieth  cen 
tury  novel.  The  author  has  made  of  her  not  only 
a  very  exceptional  and  inspiring  heroine,  but  also  a 
tremendously  and  intensely  natural  and  interesting 
character,  and  a  human  personality  far  more  real, 
far  more  vital,  far  more  modern  and  American  in  the 
best  sense  of  the  words,  than  nine-tenths  of  the  women 
of  flesh  and  blood  who  fail  or  succeed,  or  seem  to  suc 
ceed,  at  her  own  or  any  other  calling  or  profession. 

From  first  to  last,  even  more  than  in  his  other 
books,  he  is  absolutely  merciless  to  every  shred  and 
symptom  of  hypocrisy,  of  self-deception,  of  self-ex 
cuse  and  self-indulgence. 

It  is  more  than  the  very  X-ray  photography  of 
truth,  warped  and  disguised  in  a  welter  of  human 
meannesses,  human  prejudices,  human  intolerances 
and  human  ineptitudes :  it  is  a  virtual  vivisection  of 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  245 

human  motives  —  the  muscles  of  the  mind  and  the 
soul,  their  underlying  bony  structure  and  basic  in 
stincts,  and  their  overlapping  and  superficial  adipose 
tissue  of  habit  and  impulse.  It  is  sordid  and  revolting 
in  some  details  at  first.  Later  it  is  less  and  less  bru 
tally  compelling,  more  and  more  intellectually  satisfy 
ing  and  fascinating,  as  wider  areas  and  more  and  more 
intricately  ramifying  networks  of  social  and  individ 
ual  motor  and  sensory  nerves  are  exposed.  Finally 
the  book  becomes  illuminating  and  ennobling  in 
greater  or  less  degree,  according  to  the  capacity  of 
the  reader  to  bring  much  or  little  to  the  reading  of 
this  modern  masterpiece. 

Through  Mildred  and  the  rest;  through  her 
mother,  who  is  weakly  and  pretentiously  ladylike  in 
the  most  superficially  snobbish  acceptance  of  the  term 
lady  that  Mr.  Phillips  has  always  abhorred ;  through 
Presby,  her  father-in-law,  who  is  weakly  and  ma 
liciously  masculine ;  through  General  Bill  Siddall, 
who  knows  no  limits  beyond  wrhich  his  egotism  will  not 
go  when  anyone  or  anything  stands  in  its  way,  and 
who  is  at  least  made  to  seem  possible  if  not  probable ; 
through  Stanley  Baird,  who  is  a  fair  example  of  New 
York  clubman  and  snob,  naturally  rather  fine  than 
coarse,  rather  adequate  than  futile,  with  too  much 
money  and  too  little  incentive;  through  Agnes  Bel- 
loc,  who  is  one  of  the  best  characters  in  the  book  and 
a  very  significant  sign  of  the  times  in  New  England 
and  New  York  to-day ;  through  Cyrilla  Brindley,  who 
is  about  as  near  perfect  in  the  human  and  literary 
sense  as  any  character  one  meets  or  reads  about ; 
through  Jennings,  Crossley  and  Ransdell,  all  admira 
bly  conceived  and  executed  types  and  products  of 


246     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

their  peculiar  environments ;  through  Donald  Keith, 
who  at  first,  like  Bill  Siddall,  seems  keyed  a  bit  too 
high,  conceived  in  extremes  a  bit  too  glaring  and  im 
possible  for  mere  flesh  and  blood,  and  who  yet,  like 
the  little  general  of  the  sky-blue  pajamas  and  the 
needle-sharp  mustache  and  imperial  points,  is  some 
how  made  to  compare  with  the  others  and  blend  ad 
mirably  in  the  general  grouping;  through  Mildred 
herself ;  through  the  three  Mildreds :  the  first  Mildred 
that  we  know  and  read  about  (or  do  not  care  to  know 
and  read  about)  everywhere  in  American  life  and  lit 
erature  and  journalism  to-day;  the  Mildred  of  the 
reconstruction  period  —  inconsistent,  capricious,  lux 
urious,  idle,  industrious,  determined,  panic-stricken 
and  trembling,  eminently  impressive  and  successful 
at  moments  in  the  reaction  from  sheer  terror  and 
despair  and  in  the  peculiar  blend  of  knowledge 
and  ignorance  that  carries  her  blindly  past  certain 
pitfalls  and  makes  light  of  others;  the  Mildred  of 
the  last  two  chapters,  as  she  emerges  and  stands  the 
acid  test  of  seeing  and  feeling  fully  how  life  may 
be  good  though  it  may  seem  to  be  based  on  evil,  how 
it  may  be  ideal  and  idealized  through  the  translation 
of  the  most  prosaic  details  of  the  home  and  market 
place  into  inspired  and  inspiring  action  and  aspira 
tion:  in  these  the  author  strips  off  all  masks,  bares 
the  meanest  and  most  remote  of  motives,  shows  us 
human  and  bestial  nature  in  all  its  blindness  and  de 
formity,  its  inveterate  and  ineradicable  vanity  and 
slant  towards  self-deception  and  self-excuse. 

He  handles  self-conceit  and  self-sufficiency,  pre 
tense  and  plausible  egotism  as  a  great  surgeon  does 
a  cancer.  He  dissects  its  widely  branching  roots 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

and  rootlets  to  the  limit.  And  then,  when  he  has 
demonstrated,  step  by  step  and  inch  by  inch,  the  na 
ture  and  the  full  extent  of  the  disease,  with  a  logic,  an 
intuition  and  a  human  sympathy  that  no  novelist  has 
ever  shown  before ;  when  he  has  shown  all  this  to  all 
whose  gray  matter,  whose  nerves,  wrhose  vitality,  are 
still  sufficiently  unimpaired  to  render  hope  of  a  cure 
possible  or  probable,  then  he  shows  them  what  may 
gradually  be  done  in  the  way  of  building  up  new  tissue 
to  take  the  place  of  that  which  has  been  diseased  and 
excised. 

Mr.  Phillips's  style  and  general  method  has  been 
sufficiently  commented  on  already.  Here,  as  in  many 
of  his  other  books,  one  might  start  at  the  first  chap 
ter  and  quote  through  to  the  last,  paragraph  after 
paragraph  and  page  after  page  of  shrewd  common 
sense,  sound  philosophy  and  social  insight  that,  stand 
ing  alone,  sufficiently  explains  and  justifies  itself; 
that,  read  in  the  ordinary  course  of  the  narrative,  fits 
into  the  general  design  as  a  gem  into  its  setting,  as 
a  pregnant  mouth  or  eye  into  the  vital  expression  of 
a  strong  and  noble  face. 

Thus :  "  *  Quite  enough  for  New  York,'  said  she. 
'  It  is  not  interested  in  facts.  All  the  New  Yorker 
asks  of  you  is,  "  Can  you  pay  your  bills  and  help  me 
to  pay  mine  ?"'...'  I've  got  a  very  clear  idea  of 
what  a  woman  ought  to  do  about  men,  and  I  assure 
you  I'm  not  going  to  be  foolish.  And  you  know  a 
woman  who  isn't  foolish  can  be  trusted  where  a  woman 
who's  protected  only  by  her  principles  would  yield 
to  the  first  temptation  or  hunt  a  temptation  .  .  .'  ' 

"  The  best  that  can  be  said  for  human  nature  at  its 
best  is  that  it  is  as  well  behaved  as  its  real  tempta- 


246     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

their  peculiar  environments ;  through  Donald  Keith, 
who  at  first,  like  Bill  Siddall,  seems  keyed  a  bit  too 
high,  conceived  in  extremes  a  bit  too  glaring  and  im 
possible  for  mere  flesh  and  blood,  and  who  yet,  like 
the  little  general  of  the  sky-blue  pajamas  and  the 
needle-sharp  mustache  and  imperial  points,  is  some 
how  made  to  compare  with  the  others  and  blend  ad 
mirably  in  the  general  grouping;  through  Mildred 
herself;  through  the  three  Mildreds:  the  first  Mildred 
that  we  know  and  read  about  (or  do  not  care  to  know 
and  read  about)  everywhere  in  American  life  and  lit 
erature  and  journalism  to-day;  the  Mildred  of  the 
reconstruction  period  —  inconsistent,  capricious,  lux 
urious,  idle,  industrious,  determined,  panic-stricken 
and  trembling,  eminently  impressive  and  successful 
at  moments  in  the  reaction  from  sheer  terror  and 
despair  and  in  the  peculiar  blend  of  knowledge 
and  ignorance  that  carries  her  blindly  past  certain 
pitfalls  and  makes  light  of  others ;  the  Mildred  of 
the  last  two  chapters,  as  she  emerges  and  stands  the 
acid  test  of  seeing  and  feeling  fully  how  life  may 
be  good  though  it  may  seem  to  be  based  on  evil,  how 
it  may  be  ideal  and  idealized  through  the  translation 
of  the  most  prosaic  details  of  the  home  and  market 
place  into  inspired  and  inspiring  action  and  aspira 
tion:  in  these  the  author  strips  off  all  masks,  bares 
the  meanest  and  most  remote  of  motives,  shows  us 
human  and  bestial  nature  in  all  its  blindness  and  de 
formity,  its  inveterate  and  ineradicable  vanity  and 
slant  towards  self-deception  and  self-excuse. 

He  handles  self-conceit  and  self-sufficiency,  pre 
tense  and  plausible  egotism  as  a  great  surgeon  does 
a  cancer.  He  dissects  its  widely  branching  roots 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  247 

and  rootlets  to  the  limit.  And  then,  when  he  has 
demonstrated,  step  by  step  and  inch  by  inch,  the  na 
ture  and  the  full  extent  of  the  disease,  with  a  logic,  an 
intuition  and  a  human  sympathy  that  no  novelist  has 
ever  shown  before ;  when  he  has  shown  all  this  to  all 
whose  gray  matter,  whose  nerves,  whose  vitality,  are 
still  sufficiently  unimpaired  to  render  hope  of  a  cure 
possible  or  probable,  then  he  shows  them  what  may 
gradually  be  done  in  the  way  of  building  up  new  tissue 
to  take  the  place  of  that  which  has  been  diseased  and 
excised. 

Mr.  Phillips's  style  and  general  method  has  been 
sufficiently  commented  on  already.  Here,  as  in  many 
of  his  other  books,  one  might  start  at  the  first  chap 
ter  and  quote  through  to  the  last,  paragraph  after 
paragraph  and  page  after  page  of  shrewd  common 
sense,  sound  philosophy  and  social  insight  that,  stand 
ing  alone,  sufficiently  explains  and  justifies  itself; 
that,  read  in  the  ordinary  course  of  the  narrative,  fits 
into  the  general  design  as  a  gem  into  its  setting,  as 
a  pregnant  mouth  or  eye  into  the  vital  expression  of 
a  strong  and  noble  face. 

Thus :  "  '  Quite  enough  for  New  York,'  said  she. 
'  It  is  not  interested  in  facts.  All  the  New  Yorker 
asks  of  you  is,  "  Can  you  pay  your  bills  and  help  me 
to  pay  mine  ?"'...'  I've  got  a  very  clear  idea  of 
what  a  woman  ought  to  do  about  men,  and  I  assure 
you  I'm  not  going  to  be  foolish.  And  you  know  a 
woman  who  isn't  foolish  can  be  trusted  where  a  woman 
who's  protected  only  by  her  principles  would  yield 
to  the  first  temptation  or  hunt  a  temptation  .  .  .'  " 

"  The  best  that  can  be  said  for  human  nature  at  its 
best  is  that  it  is  as  well  behaved  as  its  real  tempta- 


248     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

tions  permit  .  .  ."  "  We  cannot  convince  ourselves 
.  .  .  that  a  human  character  is  never  consistent  and 
homogeneous,  is  always  conglomerate,  that  there  are 
no  two  traits,  however  naturally  exclusive,  that  can 
not  exist  in  the  same  personality,  that  circumstance 
is  the  dominating  factor  in  human  action  and  brings 
forward  as  dominant  characteristics,  now  one  trait 
or  set  of  traits,  consistent  or  inconsistent,  and  now 
another  —  may  it  not  be  that  the  characters  that 
play  the  large  parts  in  the  comedy  of  human  life  are 
those  that  offer  to  the  shifting  winds  of  circumstance 
the  greatest  variety  of  strongly  developed  but  con 
tradictory  qualities?  For  example,  if  it  was  Mil 
dred's  latent  courage  that  rescued  her  from  Siddall, 
was  it  not  her  strong  tendency  to  vacillation  that 
saved  her  from  a  loveless  and  mercenary  marriage  to 
Stanley  Baird?  Perhaps  the  deep  underlying  truth 
is  that  all  unusual  people  have  in  common  the  charac 
ter  that  centers  in  a  powerful  aversion  to  stagnation ; 
thus,  now  by  their  strong  qualities,  now  by  their  weak 
ones,  they  are  swept  inevitably  on  and  on  and  ever 
on.  Good  to-day,  bad  to-morrow ;  good  again  the 
day  after;  weak  in  this  instance,  strong  in  that,  now 
brave  and  now  cowardly,  soft  at  one  time,  hard  at 
another,  generous  and  the  reverse  by  turns,  they  are 
consistent  only  in  that  they  are  never  at  rest,  but 
incessantly  and  invariably  go." 

Perhaps  the  characters  that  fit  themselves  best  to 
play  the  large  parts  in  life,  and  certainly  the  minds  of 
something  like  the  first  order,  are  those  that  react 
best  on  environment  as  they  move  and  grow;  those 
that  have  the  Cosmos  in  themselves  most  highly 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  249 

evolved  and  sensitized  in  an  infinity  of  directions  as 
a  planet  has  sides ;  that  are  superficial  in  their  sen 
sory  impressions  and  more  or  less  immediate  reactions 
to  sense  only  in  so  far  as  such  sudden  reactions  serve 
to  inform  and  stimulate  the  larger  forces  lying  latent 
beneath  into  transient  stages  of  growth. 

Minds  and  characters  of  the  first  order  of  effective 
ness,  ancient  and  modern,  like  Cecil  Rhodes  and  Theo 
dore  Roosevelt,  Caesar  and  Alexander  (whom  Mr. 
Phillips  instances),  and  the  notable  women  who  have 
had  at  once  the  most  feminine  and  masculine  egos  of 
all  history,  may  be  cited  in  this  category. 

The  mind  of  David  Graham  Phillips  was  of  this 
order,  at  least  in  its  deep  and  broad  humanity  and  in 
its  vital  and  immediate  response  to  certain  of  the 
most  pressing  and  appalling  problems  of  the  life  of 
his  day  in  Twentieth  Century  America.  Within  his 
limitations,  he  fashioned  for  himself  and  for  others 
the  supremely  efficient  art  and  the  instrument  that 
Frank  Norris  has  defined  the  novel  in  the  hands  of  a 
modern  master  to  be ;  and  to  this  task  he  gave  him 
self  according  to  the  best  traditions  of  his  country  and 
his  time;  strenuously,  unsparingly,  humanly,  justly, 
freely,  fairly  and  effectively  in  the  service  of  his 
art  and  the  larger  service  of  life  that  art  interprets. 

He  learned  to  write  through  long  toil  and  method 
ical  daily  and  nightly  application,  very  much  as  he 
makes  his  latest  heroine  learn  to  sing  —  as  the  birds 
sing  naturally,  freely  with  a  vital  fullness  and  inten 
sity  of  tone  that  can  appeal  at  once  to  the  ear  and 
heart  of  child  and  savant,  of  musical  or  literary 
critic,  of  tired  business  man  and  worldly  woman,  of 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ideals  of  service  to  his  country  and  his  century  that 
has  yet  been  published. 

In  an  article  published  in  The  Saturday  Evening 
Past  of  October  21,  1911,  Mrs.  Walling  tells  us: 
"  He  was  a  radical.  Yet,  living  among  radicals  as 
we  did,  I  found  him  different  from  them  in  that  he 
was  objective  and  held  himself  aloof  from  clique, 
party  or  even  movement.  His  radicalism  was  a  thing 
apart  from  his  life,  and  not  life  itself.  Where  they 
were  merged  in  their  cause,  abandoned  without  reserve 
to  the  exigencies  of  the  movement,  he  was  always 
himself,  with  a  programme  of  his  own,  one  not  de 
pendent  on  any  outside  force.  But  his  individualism 
was  not  of  the  kind  that  made  him  put  his  ambitions 
before  his  ideals.  He  was  an  idealist,  as  are  all  radi 
cals.  One  could  say  his  work  chose  him,  so  great 
was  his  devotion  to  the  ideas  he  promulgated.  Un 
like  some  other  writers  who  go  farther  than  he  and 
call  themselves  Socialists,  but  whose  subjects  are  con 
ventional  or  in  contradiction  to  the  basic  principles 
of  progressive  thought,  he  in  all  his  work  had  one  aim 
—  to  unmask  his  time  and  to  pursue  it  to  the  bitter 
end." 

Concerning  The  Grain  of  Dust,  she  has  this  to  say : 
"  He  told  me  he  was  engaged  on  a  novel  of  which 
he  had  already  written  about  four  hundred  thousand 
words,  and  in  which  he  showed  that  the  respectable 
men  and  women  of  society  were  literally  responsible 
for  the  horrible  degradation  of  the  barter  in  women. 
'  The  public  will  not  soon  forgive  me  this  book,'  he 
said.  In  The  Husband's  Story  he  has  already  risked 
much.  Here  he  was  willing  to  risk  everything  for  his 
ideal  —  the  truth. 


DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS  253 

"  I  thought  how  natural  it  was  to  his  big,  direct 
nature  to  go  out  to  master  America,  to  learn  her  by 
heart,  inspired  by  the  task  of  expressing  and  inter 
preting  her,  and  to  do  so  in  the  sledge-hammer  method 
she  herself  employs,  caring  only  to  be  true  to  the 
truth.  I  saw  how  the  courage  of  his  work  rose  from 
the  courage  of  his  character.  If  I  could  have  at  that 
time  read  The  Grain  of  Dust,  I  should  have  realized 
how  there  was  a  leap  in  his  power  which  bore 
out  the  feeling  he  himself  had,  that  he  was  just  learn 
ing,  just  beginning,  that  his  years  of  sustained  and 
concentrated  effort  were  beginning  to  fulfill  them 
selves,  that  his  voice  was  about  to  be  lifted  in  greater 
strength  and  inspiration  than  ever  before." 

Such  criticism  may  not  be  wholly  impartial.  It  is 
none  the  less  inspiring  and  illuminating. 

Such  was  Phillips'  own  interpretation  of  the  Amer 
ica  of  his  time. 

Certainly,  since  the  days  of  Emerson,  no  American 
writer  of  wide  circulation  has  spoken  with  so  inspir 
ing  and  so  searching  a  voice  to  the  hearts  and  minds 
of  his  fellow-countrymen  and  women. 

During  his  lifetime  he  got  his  grip  unmistakably 
upon  the  pulse  of  our  national  consciousness. 
Though  he  is  dead,  his  grasp  on  it  still  remains. 

And  it  is  probable  that  Emerson  himself  will  be 
ranked  no  higher  by  posterity,  as  a  prophet  of  Amer 
ica  and  democracy  and  a  regenerative  force  and  stim 
ulus,  than  this  trained  reporter  and  journalist  and 
middle- Western  product  of  Princeton  and  Park  Row, 
who  made  himself  a  world  novelist  by  main  force,  and 
who,  true  to  the  best  ethics  of  his  breed  and  profes 
sion,  went  for  legitimate  results  and  got  them. 


VI 

STEWART   EDWARD   WHITE   AND  ALL   OUTDOORS 

"  The  intellectual  and  spiritual  interests  of  the  nation 
equally  with  its  natural  resources  of  forest,  mine  and  stream 
must  be  conserved  and  fostered."  Joseph  Jastrow,  The  Qual 
ities  of  Men,  1910. 

FRANK  NORRIS,  Jack  London,  Owen  Wister,  Rex 
Beach  and  James  Hopper  have  shown  us  that  the 
frontier  is  vanishing  from  the  borders  of  the  United 
States  proper,  that  it  is  shifting  to  the  Philippines 
and  Alaska,  and  farther  still,  West,  North  and 
South. 

Stewart  Edward  White  has  proved  that  it  still  re 
mains  to  us  in  Michigan  logging  camps  and  Arizona 
ranches,  where  the  primitive  savagery  of  red  men  and 
white  is  reenforced  by  the  incursions  of  capital ;  where 
sheep  wars  and  cattle  wars  have  taken  the  place  of  the 
old  border  warfare  between  settlers  and  red-skinned 
raiders ;  and  where  the  service  of  the  Government's 
forest  rangers  to-day,  in  times  of  peace,  may  justly 
be  compared  in  its  occasional  perils  and  frequent  pri 
vations  —  all  accepted  as  a  part  of  the  day's  work  — 
to  that  of  Uncle  Sam's  regulars  on  the  trail  of  hostile 
bands  of  Indians  twenty  or  thirty  years  ago. 

Mr.  White  knows  the  wild  and  the  frontier,  its 
dangers  and  its  hardships  that  tempt  men  of  his  type 

more  than  they  repel,  because  he  was  born  to  it.     At 

254 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         255 

this  writing,  he  is  in  Africa,  hunting  big  game.  By 
temperament  and  by  heredity,  he  belongs  to  the  blood 
and  the  mental  temper  of  the  pioneers.  No  less  than 
Norris  and  London,  he  saw  life  first  —  he  went  out 
into  the  wild  places  of  the  earth  in  search  of  adventure 
before  he  came  back  and  went  to  Harvard  to  learn 
to  write  English  as  English  is  written  there. 

On  both  counts  he  is  competent  to  write  of  the  fron 
tier  as  he  does  on  the  first  page  of  The  Blazed 
Trail,  1902 :  "  When  history  has  granted  him  the 
justice  of  perspective,  we  shall  know  the  American 
pioneer  as  one  of  the  most  picturesque  of  her  many 
figures.  Resourceful,  self-reliant,  bold;  adapting 
himself  with  fluidity  to  divers  circumstances  and  con 
ditions  ;  meeting  with  equal  cheerfulness  of  confidence 
and  completeness  of  capability  both  unknown  dangers 
and  the  perils  by  which  he  has  been  educated ;  seizing 
the  useful  in  the  lives  of  the  men  and  beasts  nearest 
him,  and  assimilating  it  with  marvelous  rapidity ;  he 
presents  to  the  world  a  picture  of  complete  adequacy 
which  it  would  be  difficult  to  match  in  any  other  walk 
of  life. 

"  He  is  a  strong  man,  with  a  strong  man's  virtues 
and  a  strong  man's  vices.  In  him  the  passions  are 
elemental,  the  dramas  epic,  for  he  lives  in  the  age 
when  men  are  close  to  nature  and  draw  from  her  their 
forces.  He  satisfies  his  needs  direct  from  the  earth. 
.  .  .  We  feel  that  his  steps  are  planted  on  solid  earth, 
for  civilizations  may  crumble  without  disturbing  his 
magnificent  self-poise.  In  him  we  perceive  dimly  his 
environment.  .  .  . 

"  Like  the  nature  that  he  has  fought  until  he  un 
derstands  it,  his  disposition  is  at  once  kindly  and 


256     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

terrible.  .  .  .  Relieved  of  the  strenuousness  of  his 
occupation.  .  .  .  instead  of  pleasure,  he  seeks  orgies. 
He  runs  to  wild  excesses  of  drinking,  fighting  and 
carousing.  .  .  . 

"  This  is  not  the  moment  to  judge  him.  And  yet 
one  cannot  help  admiring  the  magnificently  pictur 
esque  spectacle  of  such  energies  running  riot.  The 
power  is  still  in  evidence,  though  beyond  its  proper 
application." 

Here  is  evidently  a  partial  statement  of  the  prob 
lems,  not  alone  of  material  conservation,  but  of  mental 
and  spiritual  as  well,  on  the  vanishing  frontier  that 
is  left  to  us.  The  Blazed  Trail  is  a  story  not 
alone  of  timber  thieves  and  thievery  on  the  wholesale 
scale;  not  alone  of  the  material  and  technical  side  of 
the  life  in  Michigan  logging  camps,  and  the  intensely 
interesting  and  picturesque  phases  of  the  life  there ; 
not  alone  of  cut-throat  methods  of  business  competi 
tion  between  two  big  logging  firms  engaged  in  a 
struggle  to  the  death:  it  is  the  record  of  a  strong 
man's  evolution  towards  the  goal  of  success  that  he 
has  set,  down  the  trail  that  he  has  blazed  for  himself, 
to  his  final  recognition  of  the  fact  that  no  man  can 
afford  to  live  alone  for  himself  and  in  himself  too 
long. 

With  success  at  hand  he  tempts  failure  to  serve  a 
friend;  with  victory  once  more  wrested  from  the  wil 
derness,  he  lets  it  go  to  save  a  life;  and  the  love  and 
the  loyalty  that  he  has  unconsciously  inspired  makes 
good  his  fortunes  in  spite  of  him  and  turns  his  hard 
hitting  shanty  men  and  white  water  daredevils,  at  the 
season  of  their  annual  outbreak,  from  border  ruffians 
into  the  stuff  of  which  heroes  are  made. 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         257 

The  Blazed  Trail  is  a  big  book.  It  is  an  in 
tensely  American  one.  It  chronicles  an  era  and  a 
locale  which  are  passing.  But  above  and  beyond  this 
it  embodies  a  spirit  that  has  not  died,  and  never  will, 
as  long  as  men  like  the  writer,  and  the  men  and 
women  he  represents,  are  born  and  bred  on  American 
soil. 

The  Blazed  Trail  is  a  story  of  late  nineteenth 
century  big  business  on  the  frontier  in  Michigan.  It 
is  essentially  Western  in  its  directness  and  singleness 
of  purpose.  Such  was  the  mental  and  moral  make 
up  of  its  chief  character. 

Harry  Thorpe  is  the  son  of  an  embezzler.  He  is 
thrown  on  his  own  resources  at  the  age  of  twenty-six, 
with  a  sister  to  take  care  of,  and  with  practical  re 
sources  limited  to  the  clothes  he  stands  up  in,  three 
dollars  in  his  pockets,  and  the  high-powered  brain  and 
body  that  make  the  man. 

We  make  his  acquaintance  on  a  logging  railroad 
in  the  Lower  Michigan  peninsula  on  his  way  to  one 
of  Morrison  and  Daly's  camps  in  search  of  work  and 
experience.  Just  what  had  been  his  experience  be 
fore  this  we  are  not  told,  beyond  the  fact  that  his 
knowledge  of  the  woods  is  purely  theoretical  —  and 
once  the  action  of  the  book  begins  we  forget  to  ask. 

"  '  Ticket,  Jack,'  repeated  the  conductor,  '  come  on 
now.'  The  big  bearded  man  leaned  uncertainly 
against  the  seat. 

"  '  Now  look  here,  Bud,'  he  urged  in  wheedling 
tones,  *  I  ain't  got  no  ticket.  You  know  how  it  is, 
Bud.  I  blows  my  stake.'  He  fished  uncertainly  in 
his  pocket  and  produced  a  quart  bottle  nearly  empty. 
'  Have  a  drink  ?  ' 


258     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  '  No,'  said  the  conductor  sharply. 

"  '  A'right,'  replied  Jack,  amiably,  '  take  one  my 
self.'  He  tipped  the  bottle,  emptied  it,  and  chucked 
it  through  the  window.  The  conductor  paid  no  ap 
parent  attention  to  the  breaking  of  the  glass. 

"  '  If  you  haven't  any  ticket  you  will  have  to  get 
off,'  said  he. 

"  The  big  man  straightened  up. 

"  '  You  go  to  hell,'  he  snorted ;  and  with  the  sole 
of  his  spiked  boot  delivered  a  mighty  kick  at  the 
conductor's  thigh. 

"  The  official,  agile  as  a  wildcat,  leaped  back,  then 
forward,  and  knocked  the  man  half  the  length  of  the 
car." 

After  that  he  is  unceremoniously  thrown  off 
the  train.  Three  of  his  friends  start  to  take  a  hand 
in  the  game,  but  are  easily  subdued  by  the  conductor 
and  one  brakeman,  and  conclude  to  pay.  Ten  miles 
further  on  at  the  first  station,  the  first  man's  "  tur 
key,"  or  canvas  sack,  is  put  off  for  him.  Thorpe 
continues  on  in  the  smoker  till  he  reaches  his  sta 
tion  and  proceeds  to  fit  himself  into  the  environment 
already  outlined  with  efficiency  and  speed. 

Before  the  winter  is  over,  he  has  been  promoted  to 
the  position  of  cant  hook  man  under  John  Radway, 
who  has  taken  a  contract  from  Morrison  and  Daly 
to  cut  and  deliver  five  million  feet  of  timber,  with  the 
understanding  that  if  he  fails  to  deliver  the  whole  of 
it  by  a  certain  date  he  gets  nothing  for  his  winter's 
work.  Radway  gets  in  three  million  and  a  half;  the 
rest,  though  cut,  is  hung  up  in  the  woods  for  lack  of 
water  to  "  drive  "  it  down. 

Thorpe   effects    a   compromise   by  which  Radway 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         259 

gets  nine  thousand  dollars.  Radway  makes  him  take 
a  thousand  of  it.  And  after  arranging  to  send  his 
sister  to  school  for  the  next  winter,  Thorpe  plans  to 
spend  the  summer  as  a  landlooker,  or  timber  pros 
pector,  in  the  northern  peninsula.  This  part  of  the 
book  was  originally  published  as  a  serial  in  McClure's 
Magazine  and  is  a  small  epic  in  itself.  Thorpe  finds 
that  Morrison  and  Daly  are  here,  too,  before  him. 
They  have  built  a  pier  at  the  mouth  of  the  river  Os- 
sawinnamakee,  as  well  as  dams  for  driving  the  logs 
farther  up  stream,  with  the  intention  of  eventually 
logging  the  whole  river  basin.  To  this  end  they  have 
bought  from  the  government  three  sections  near  their 
dams  and,  without  cutting  the  trees  on  these,  have  be 
gun  to  steal  the  timber  on  sections  far  more  remote. 
Later,  when  the  country  had  been  opened  up,  they 
would  buy  in  the  rest  of  the  standing  timber  as  soon 
as  they  were  forced  to. 

Thorpe  determines  to  block  their  game.  To  this 
end  he  establishes  himself,  for  the  summer,  as  a  hunter 
and  trapper  near  one  of  their  dams.  He  makes 
friends  with  one  of  the  Woods  Indians,  and  later  with 
Wallace  Carpenter,  a  young  man  from  Chicago,  who 
appears  on  the  scene  in  the  course  of  a  hunting  ex 
pedition.  Carpenter  has  more  money  and  time  on  his 
hands  than  he  knows  what  to  do  with.  He  becomes 
Thorpe's  partner  with  the  prospect  of  buying  and 
working  all  the  best  timber  in  the  river  basin,  and 
goes  south  to  raise  the  necessary  capital.  Shortly 
after  his  departure,  Thorpe's  purpose  is  detected  by 
Morrison  and  Daly's  timber  scouts,  and  Thorpe  beats 
Morrison  to  the  Detroit  land  office  by  a  hair's 
breadth  after  crossing  the  upper  Michigan  peninsula 


260     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

on  foot,  guided  by  Injin  Charley,  in  less  than  two 
days  and  two  nights. 

Thorpe  and  Carpenter  secure  title  to  all  the  timber 
they  care  to  handle,  the  trail  is  blazed,  and  the  real 
action  of  the  book  begins.  Thorpe  demands  success 
of  his  men  and  his  overseers,  as  a  general  and  a  con 
queror  demands  it  of  his  subordinates.  He  makes  his 
outfit,  his  various  camps,  the  way  his  men  are  re 
cruited,  fed  and  housed,  and  the  morale  of  the  force 
that  has  become  a  by-word  for  achieving  the  impossi 
ble,  a  machine  of  the  first  order  of  efficiency. 

The  time  comes  when  he  demands  success  against 
odds  as  rigorously  of  himself  as  he  has  for  years  from 
others.  His  partner  is  tempted  into  unfortunate 
speculations  in  stocks,  by  operators  subsidized  by  Mor 
rison  and  Daly.  Thorpe  and  Carpenter's  credit  as  a 
firm  has  to  be  pledged  to  the  limit  to  protect  Carpen 
ter's  margins.  Thorpe  contracts  with  himself  to 
take  out  thirty  million  feet  of  lumber  in  a  single  year 
without  the  logging  railroad  that  he  has  planned  to 
build. 

Morrison  and  Daly's  men  dynamite  one  of  his  dams 
when  Thorpe's  logs  are  jammed  above  it  at  the  height 
of  the  best  spring  freshet.  Finally  a  forty-day  drive 
has  to  go  out  in  ten  days  and  Thorpe  and  his  men, 
against  all  obstacles,  achieve  the  impossible. 

Just  before  this  Thorpe  has  fallen  in  love  with 
Hilda  Farrand,  a  friend  of  Carpenter's  sister.  His 
wooing  is  brief,  elemental  and  successful,  till  Hilda 
objects  to  his  cutting  the  pine  grove  near  Carpenter's 
summer  camp  in  which  they  first  met.  Thorpe  tells 
her  that  he  needs  the  money,  but  refuses  to  tell  her 
how  and  why  he  needs  it,  and  why  in  the  firm's  hour 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         261 

of  need  it  is  imperative  that  that  particular  growth 
of  pines  must  go,  instead  of  other  timber  further  off 
and  less  accessible. 

Hilda,  who  has  a  million  or  two  of  her  own  and 
a  highly  patrician  scorn  of  money  for  money's  sake, 
leaves  him  and  goes  back  to  her  home  in  Michigan 
Avenue,  Chicago.  There  she  learns  later  the  reason 
for  Thorpe's  struggle  against  time  through  news 
paper  accounts  of  the  final  rounds  of  the  fight. 

Thorpe  gets  his  logs  down  to  harbor  at  the  mouth 
of  the  river.  The  river  continues  to  rise,  and  one  of 
Morrison  and  Daly's  men  succeeds  in  partially  filing 
the  chains  that  hold  together  the  log  boom  surround 
ing  the  bulk  of  the  timber.  Wallace  Carpenter  de 
tects  him,  is  held  up  at  the  pistol's  point,  and  gets 
away  by  diving  and  swimming  out  of  range.  Thorpe 
and  one  of  his  men  go  out  toward  the  middle  of  the 
boom  to  strengthen  the  weakened  chains.  The  man 
falls  into  the  swift  current  outside  the  boom.  Thorpe 
knocks  the  last  chain  loose,  the  boom  sways  out 
towards  the  man,  he  is  saved  and  the  logs  are  lost. 

Thorpe  leaves  his  partner  and  his  men,  and  with 
out  changing  his  clothes  or  sleeping,  goes  direct  as 
fast  as  the  first  train  can  carry  him  to  the  house  in 
Michigan  Avenue.  Hilda  understands  his  elemental 
need  of  her :  after  some  trouble  she  makes  him  under 
stand  that  he  needs  her  help,  and  the  help  of  her 
money,  too,  in  protecting  Carpenter's  margins.  He 
remains  in  Chicago  all  summer  and  finally  succeeds 
in  putting  the  firm  on  a  sound  financial  basis. 

At  the  end  of  the  summer,  Wallace  Carpenter  and 
his  sister,  Thorpe's  sister,  Thorpe  and  Hilda  start 
back  for  the  north;  and  Thorpe  finds  that  his  men 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

have  put  in  the  whole  summer  at  work  for  him,  and 
have  succeeded  in  retrieving  three  million  feet  of  the 
logs  that  had  been  lost. 

"  '  Men,'  cried  Thorpe,  '  I  have  been  very  fortu 
nate.  From  failure  success  has  come.  But  never 
have  I  been  more  fortunate  than  in  my  friends.  The 
firm  is  now  on  its  feet.  It  could  afford  to  lose  three 
times  the  logs  it  lost  this  year.  .  .  .' 

"  He  paused  and  scanned  their  faces. 

"  '  But,'  he  continued  suddenly,  '  it  cannot,  now  or 
ever,  afford  to  lose  what  those  three  million  feet  repre 
sent  —  the  friends  it  has  made.  I  can  pay  you  back 
the  money  you  have  spent  and  the  time  you  have  put 
in.' 

"  Again  he  looked  them  over,  and  then  for  the  first 
time  since  they  had  known  him  his  face  lighted  up 
with  a  rare  and  tender  smile  of  affection.  '  But, 
comrades,  I  shall  not  offer  to  do  it;  the  gift  is  ac 
cepted  in  the  spirit  with  which  it  was  offered.' 

"  He  got  no  further.  The  air  was  rent  with 
sound.  .  .  .  Hilda  was  weeping  with  excitement. 
Through  the  tears  she  saw  them  all  looking  at  their 
leader,  and  in  the  worn,  hard  faces  glowed  the  ad 
miration  of  a  dog  for  its  master.  Somehow  this  was 
especially  touching  in  them,  for  strong  men  rarely 
show  it.  She  felt  a  great  wave  of  excitement  sweep 
over  her.  Instantly  she  was  standing  by  Thorpe, 
her  eyes  streaming,  her  breast  throbbing  with  emo 
tion. 

"  '  Oh !  '  she  cried,  stretching  her  arms  out  to  them 
passionately,  '  Oh !  I  love  you.  I  love  you  all ! '  " 

Here  is  another  man's  woman,  and  a  book  of  the 
people,  by  the  people,  for  the  people,  from  start  to 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          263 

finish,  from  the  first  page  to  the  last.  We  may  sum 
marize  the  whole  book  as  the  author  does  an  early  sec 
tion  of  it  in  his  own  words :  "  Such  is  the  drama  of 
the  saw  log,  a  story  of  grit,  resourcefulness,  adaptabil 
ity,  fortitude  and  ingenuity  hard  to  match.  Condi 
tions  never  repeat  themselves  in  the  woods,  as  they  do 
in  the  factory.  The  wilderness  offers  ever  new  com 
plications  to  solve,  difficulties  to  overcome.  A  man 
must  think  of  everything,  figure  on  everything,  from 
the  grand  sweep  of  the  country  at  large  to  the  pres 
sure  on  a  king  bolt.  .  .  .  His  wits  must  help  him 
where  his  experience  fails ;  and  his  experience  must 
push  him  mechanically  along  the  track  of  habit  when 
successive  buffetings  have  beaten  the  wits  out  of  his 
head.  .  .  .  Without  a  thought  of  expense  he  must 
abandon,  as  temporary,  property  which  other  indus 
tries  cry  out  at  being  compelled  to  acquire  as  perma 
nent.  For  this  reason  he  becomes  in  time  different 
from  his  fellows.  The  wihkrness  leaves  something 
of  her  mystery  in  his  eyes,  that  mystery  of  hidden, 
unknown,  but  guessed  power.  Men  look  after  him  on 
the  street  as  they  would  look  after  any  other  pioneer, 
in  vague  admiration  of  a  scope  more  virile  than  their 
own." 

In  this  book  Mr.  White,  like  his  hero,  has  very 
little  time  for  the  mystery  of  the  wilderness.  He  re 
alizes  that  it  is  there.  Otherwise  he  could  not  write 
as  he  has  written  in  the  first  chapter  of  the  "  Forest 
Runner  "  section : 

"  In  every  direction  the  woods.  Not  an  opening 
of  any  kind  offered  the  mind  a  breathing  place  under 
the  free  sky.  Sometimes  the  pine  groves  —  vast, 
solemn,  grand,  with  the  patrician  aloofness  of  the 


264     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

truly  great ;  sometimes  the  hard  wood  —  bright,  mys 
terious,  full  of  life ;  sometimes  the  swamps  —  dark, 
dank,  speaking  with  the  voices  of  the  shyer  creatures ; 
sometimes  the  spruce  and  balsam  thickets  —  aro 
matic,  enticing.  But  never  the  clear,/  open  sky. 

"  And  always  the  woods  creatures,  in  startling 
abundance  and  tameness.  The  solitary  man  with  the 
pack  straps  across  his  forehead  and  shoulders  had 
never  seen  so  many  of  them.  They  withdrew  silently 
before  him  as  he  advanced.  They  accompanied  him 
on  either  side,  watching  him  with  intelligent,  bright 
eyes.  They  followed  him  stealthily  for  a  little  dis 
tance,  as  though  escorting  him  out  of  their  own  par 
ticular  territory.  Dozens  of  times  a  day  the  traveler 
glimpsed  the  flaunting  white  flags  of  deer.  .  .  .  Hun 
dreds  of  birds  of  which  he  did  not  know  the  names 
stooped  to  his  inspection,  whirred  away  at  his  ap 
proach,  or  went  about  their  business  with  hardy  indif 
ference  under  his  very  nose.  Blase  porcupines 
trundled  superbly  from  his  path.  Once,  a  mother 
partridge  simulated  a  broken  wing,  fluttering  pain 
fully.  Early  one  morning  the  traveler  ran  plump  on 
a  fat  lolling  bear  taking  his  ease  from  the  sun,  and 
his  meal  from  a  panic-stricken  army  of  ants.  .  .  . 

"  And  all  about  and  through,  weaving,  watching, 
moving  like  spirits,  were  the  forest  multitudes  which 
the  young  man  never  saw,  but  which  he  divined,  and 
of  whose  movements  he  sometimes  caught  for  a  single 
instant  the  faintest  patter  or  rustle.  It  constituted 
the  mystery  of  the  forest;  that  great  fascinating, 
lovable  mystery  which,  once  it  steals  into  the  heart  of 
a  man,  has  always  a  hearing  and  a  longing  when  it 
makes  its  voice  heard." 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          265 

But  Mr.  White  and  the  men  that  he  interprets  are 
busy  with  big  business.  They  realize,  some  of  them, 
that  their  time  is  short;  that  after  them  must  come 
the  settlers  and  the  farmers,  the  towns  and  the  cities. 
And  they  go  about  their  work  with  speed  and  ef 
ficiency,  till  the  old  problems  of  the  world's  two  great 
est  ideals  arises  and  Hilda  states  the  woman's  side : 

"  '  I  have  seen  a  vision,'  said  she  simply,  and  low 
ered  her  head  to  conceal  her  eyes.  Then  she  looked 
at  him  again.  '  There  can  be  nothing  better  than 
love,'  she  said. 

"  '  Yes,  one  thing,'  said  Thorpe  —  '  the  duty  of 
success.' 

"  The  man  had  stated  his  creed,  the  woman  hers." 

Both  of  them  learn  better  before  the  end  of  the 
book  —  that  the  broadest  and  highest  humanity  makes 
due  allowance  for  both.  Later  Thorpe  tells  her: 
"  *  I  used  to  imagine  I  was  a  strong  man,  yet  see  how 
little  my  best  efforts  amount  to.  I  have  put  myself 
into  seven  years  of  the  hardest  work,  working  like  ten 
men  to  succeed.  .  .  .  Three  times  my  affairs  have 
become  critical.  ...  I  have  been  saved  first  by  a 
mere  boy;  then  by  an  old  illiterate  man;  now  by  a 
weak  woman.  .  .  .'  *  Harry,'  she  said  soberly  when 
he  had  quite  finished,  '  I  agree  with  you  that  God 
meant  the  strong  man  to  succeed ;  that  without  suc 
cess  the  man  has  not  fulfilled  his  reason  for  being. 
But,  Harry,  are  you  quite  sure  that  God  meant  him 
to  succeed  alone?  ' 

*'  '  And  why,'  she  went  on  after  a  moment,  '  why 
is  not  that  too  a  part  of  a  man's  success  —  the  gath 
ering  about  him  of  people  who  can  and  will  supple 
ment  his  efforts?'" 


266     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

In  other  words,  it  is  the  democracy  of  success  and 
a  fundamental  part  of  the  success  of  democracy  that 
Mr.  White  has  demonstrated  here  —  the  same  story 
that  Booth  Tarkington  has  told  in  The  Gentleman 
from  Indiana  and  The  Conquest  of  Canaan. 

In  Conjurer's  House,  which  was  published  the 
next  year,  he  deals  with  more  primitive  and  auto 
cratic  conditions.  Concerning  this  Churchill  Wil 
liams  says  in  The  Bookman  for  May,  1903 :  "  Con 
jurer's  House  exhibits  a  growing  sense  of  propor 
tion,  and  in  general  an  advance  in  literary  method. 
Mr.  White  certainly  is  one  of  the  few  men  now  writ 
ing  to  whom  we  may  look  for  fiction  that  will  continue 
to  be  read  for  its  convincing  representation  of  Amer 
ican  life. 

".  .  .  Conjurer's  House  is  a  Hudson  Bay  trad 
ing  port.  Within  the  confines  of  the  little  half- 
civilized  community  of  a  few  whites  and  some  score  of 
half-breeds  and  Indians,  and  all  in  two  days,  re 
venge  ;  common  allegiance  to  an  employer,  grown  into 
a  sort  of  fierce  sentiment ;  obedience  akin  to  fear ;  the 
inborn  sense  of  independence,  an  elemental  discrimina 
tion  between  right  and  wrong;  a  love  which  casts 
everything  else  aside;  work  out  their  own  ends.  It 
is  all  boldly  done,  intense,  rapid ;  there  is  no  wasted 
word. 

"  In  these  two  days  a  daughter  of  the  Company 
meets  a  young  free  trader  who  has  been  caught  on 
the  forbidden  ground  and  brought  a  prisoner  to  the 
post;  ...  by  his  physical  vigor,  his  half-scornful 
courage,  his  moveless  will,  and  his  almost  hopeless 
situation  she  is  swept  from  the  moorings  of  her  con 
vent  training  and  worship  of  her  autocratic  old  father, 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          267 

the  head  of  the  station ;  in  contact  with  the  threat  of 
slow  and  horrible  death  which  hangs  over  the  young 
man's  head  she  furnishes  him  with  the  means  of  es 
cape  and  then  proves  that  she  loves  him  ...  a  dra 
matic  and  decidedly  abrupt  crisis  brings  the  strength 
and  weakness  of  the  three  principal  characters  in 
to  high  relief  .  .  .  the  perfection  ...  of  ...  aus 
tere  yet  always  picturesque  life,  of  the  romance  of  its 
adventure.  .  .  .  Done  eagerly  in  outline  the  charac 
ters  are  definite,  individual,  suggestive. 

"  One  might  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  they  are  in 
spiring." 

Mr.  Williams  complains  that  the  book  is  too  short, 
that  it  is  little  more  than  a  short  story.  But  the  ac 
tion  is  so  intense  that  it  is  better  so.  It  is  a  book 
easily  read  at  a  sitting  and  not  easily  forgotten. 
Those  who  do  not  know  what  it  means  to  go  on  the 
Long  Trail  in  the  language  of  the  Hudson  Bay  Coun 
try  and  how  what  is  now  a  common  metaphor  made  its 
first  definite  impression  on  the  men  who  first  used  it 
in  all  seriousness,  may  find  out  here  if  they  choose. 
And  once  they  have  found  out,  the  knowledge  will  stay 
with  them. 

A  year  later  Conjurer's  House  was  succeeded  by 
The  Silent  Places.  Of  this  Mr.  Williams  writes 
in  The  Bookman  for  May,  1904:  "He  sets  him 
self  the  task  of  picturing  the  Long  Trail  into  the 
north,  the  Long  Trail  in  winter,  with  its  grim  ter 
rors  and  giant  vistas  of  white.  It  is  a  deliberate  and 
serious  attempt  at  tragedy,  and,  judged  by  the  im 
pression  of  intense  suffering  which  it  creates,  it  is  a 
successful  attempt.  ...  It  is  from  the  post  of  the 
Hudson  Bay  Company  that  the  two  runners  of 


268     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  Company  start  on  their  hunt  for  Jingoes,  the  de 
faulting  Indian  trapper.  .  .  .  His  trail  must  be 
found  and  he  be  hunted  down  and  brought  back  to 
be  punished  as  an  example  of  what  happens  to  a  dis 
honest  Indian.  The  men  who  volunteer  to  find  him 
are  a  weather-beaten  and  scarred  veteran  of  the  Com 
pany's  service  and  a  younger  man,  Dick  Herron, 
lithe,  strong,  determined  ...  in  a  canoe  they  paddle 
away,  on  the  great  waters  of  the  Moose;  the  chase 
is  on  ...  he  has  introduced  at  the  very  opening  of 
his  story  the  Ojibway  girl,  May-may-gwan  (the  But 
terfly). 

"  The  study  of  character  and  temperament  offered 
in  the  persons  of  May-may-gwan  and  Dick  Herron 
...  is  sane,  consistent,  sincere.  With  the  tempta 
tion  strong  upon  him  to  allow  Herron  to  surrender 
to  the  silent  pleading  of  the  woman  for  her  lover,  the 
novelist  has  refused  to  allow  the  man  to  be  false  to 
his  prejudices  and  ambitions.  .  .  .  The  story  affords 
at  once  a  contrast  and  a  comparison  of  the  qualities 
of  two  persons  representing  two  races  —  the  white 
and  the  Indian.  .  .  .  May-may-gwan  trudges 
through  the  snow,  silently,  ceaselessly,  in  the  foot 
steps  of  Herron,  because,  as  she  tells  Sam  Bolton, 
she  has  found  Herron  *  good  in  my  sight  and  he  looked 
on  me.'  Because  of  this  she  endures  his  rebuffs, 
nurses  him  alone  for  three  months  when  his  leg  is 
broken,  makes  his  fire,  cooks  his  food  .  .  .  follows 
him  till  weakness  brings  her  to  her  knees  in  the  snow." 

Here  Mr.  Williams  quotes: 

"  '  Do  not  grieve ;  I  am  happy  — '  she  whispers. 
'  There  must  be  a  border,  I  will  be  waiting  there.  I 
will  wait  always.  I  am  yours,  yours,  yours !  You 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          269 


two  arms,  searching  his  eyes  with  terror,  trying  to 
reassure  herself,  to  drive  off  the  doubts  that  had  sud 
denly  thronged  upon  her.  '  Tell  me,'  she  shook  him 
by  the  arm. 

"  '  I  am  yours.'  Dick  lied  steadily.  '  My  heart  is 
yours.  I  love  you.'  He  bent  and  kissed  her  on  the 
lips.  She  quivered  and  closed  her  eyes  with  a  deep 
sigh.  And  so  she  died." 

Herron's  is  not  an  agreeable  figure,  according  to 
Mr.  Williams,  "  yet  in  his  indomitable  will  and  splen 
did  physical  power  there  is  something  so  tremendous 
as  to  compel  admiration  despite  his  sullenness  and 
brutal  fury.  He  is  of  a  piece  with  his  environment 
and  his  task,  as  in  a  less  dramatic  sense  is  his  com 
panion  Bolton.  Only  the  wilderness,  with  its  vast 
distances,  its  snow,  its  bleak  winds,  and  its  icy  grip 
is  big  enough  for  his  figure.  Of  what  this  wilder 
ness  of  the  North  means,  Mr.  White  comes  nearer 
to  giving  us  a  conception  than  anyone  who  has  yet 
written  of  it.  .  .  ." 

Quotations  almost  at  random  substantiate  this. 
The  following  passage,  describing  the  first  attack  of 
the  polar  cold  upon  the  travelers,  is  perhaps  sufficient : 

"  *  And  now  the  North  increased,  by  ever  so  little 
the  pressure  against  them,  sharpening  the  cold  by  a 
trifle:  adding  a  few  flakes'  weight  to  the  snow  they 
must  lift  on  their  shoes ;  throwing  into  the  vista  be 
fore  them  a  deeper,  chillier  tone  of  gray  discourage 
ment  ;  intensifying  the  loneliness,  giving  to  the  winds 
of  desolation  a  voice.  Well  the  great  antagonist 
knew  she  could  not  thus  stop  these  men,  but  so,  little 
by  little,  she  ground  them  down,  wore  away  the  ex- 


270     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

cess  of  their  vitality,  reduced  them  to  a  grim  plod 
ding,  so  that  at  the  moment  she  would  hold  them 
weakened  to  her  purposes.  They  made  no  sign,  for 
they  were  of  the  great  men  of  the  earth,  but  they 
bent  to  the  familiar  touch  of  many  little  fingers  push 
ing  them  back." 

And  again  — "  After  the  dense  forest  .  .  .  low 
thickets  of  spruce  and  poplar,  followed  in  turn  by  the 
open  reaches  planted,  like  a  park  with  the  pointed  firs. 
Then  came  the  Land  of  the  Little  Sticks  and  so  on 
out  into  the  vast  whiteness  of  the  true  North,  where 
the  trees  are  lilliputian  and  the  spaces  gigantic  beyond 
the  measures  of  earth ;  where  living  things  dwindle  to 
the  significance  of  black  specks  on  a  limitless  field  of 
white,  and  the  aurora  crackles  and  shoots  and  spreads 
and  threatens  like  a  great  inimical  and  magnificent 
spirit." 

From  this  viewpoint  the  book,  short  as  it  is,  is  more 
than  epic ;  it  is  elemental ;  it  has  the  force  of  a  Greek 
tragedy  cast  unconventionally  on  a  wider  stage,  where 
the  hearts  and  souls  of  men  and  women  in  the  end 
mean  infinitely  more  to  us  than  dots  on  the  vast  ex 
panse  of  polar  snow. 

There  is  something  more  than  mere  poetic  justice 
in  the  end  of  the  chase,  when  Bolton  and  the  girl  lost 
by  the  way,  and  Herron  at  the  end  of  his  own 
strength,  the  latter  sees  Jingoes,  the  Indian  trapper 
and  thief,  staggering  back  straight  towards  him, 
snow  blind  and  doubling  on  his  trail.  There  is  an 
element  of  something  more  than  fate  here  that  strikes 
home  irresistibly  to  the  reader's  consciousness;  and 
that  ends  the  final  tableau,  as  simply,  as  forcibly,  as 
inevitably  as  innumerable  actual  dramas  of  the  vast 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         271 

silences  of  existence  must  and  do  end.  Up  to  the 
present  writing,  in  a  strictly  literary  sense,  this  is 
far  the  best  of  Mr.  White's  books.  It  deserves  rec 
ognition  as  a  memorable  achievement  of  American  lit 
erature. 

One  may  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  it  is  more  than 
American;  that  it  is  cosmic;  and  that  equally  with 
The  Octopus,  it  belongs  indisputably  to  the  irreduc 
ible  medium  of  human  interpretation  through  fiction 
that  the  centuries  retain  in  the  literature  of  the  world 
at  large. 

Besides  this,  several  of  Mr.  White's  other  novels, 
excellent  as  they  are  in  their  way  —  like  his  outdoor 
books  for  boys  and  men  about  The  Mountain,  The 
Pass  and  The  Forest  —  are  inconsiderable,  treated 
as  literature.  The  Claim  Jumpers,  one  of  his  earliest 
efforts,  is  amusing  and  readable.  The  Westerners, 
which  was  published  shortly  before  The  Blazed  Trail, 
takes  the  reader  into  territory  that  Owen  Wister, 
Clarence  Mulford,  George  Patullo  and  Eugene  Man- 
love  Rhodes  have  made  more  effectively  their  own. 

In  The  Mystery,  written  in  collaboration  with 
Samuel  Hopkins  Adams,  we  have  a  story  of  adventure 
with  a  modern  scientific  twist  to  its  construction, 
which,  in  places,  may  fairly  be  compared  to  Treasure 
Island. 

In  Arizona  Nights,  1907,  Mr.  White  comes  back 
to  the  West  again,  and  shows  himself  quite  as  much 
at  home  there,  briefly,  as  anyone  who  has  written  of 
the  locale  staked  out  in  the  title.  To  particularize 
no  farther,  short  stories  (later  woven  into  coherent 
novelization)  as  widely  divergent  in  material  and 
treatment  as  The  Rawhide,  The  Honk  Honk  Breed 


272     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  The  Remittance  Mem,  rank  with  Bret  Harte's, 
Wister's  and  London's  best  novels  as  little  stories 
of  the  West  that  is  passing  and  Anglo-Saxon  pioneer 
and  frontier  life. 

n. 

In  Blazed  Trail  Stories  —  brief,  sharply  cut  epi 
sodes  in  the  lives  of  the  Michigan  woodsmen  and  river 
drivers  —  and  in  The  Riverman,  1908,  Mr.  White 
returns  to  the  woods  and  big  business  again.  In  the 
latter  book  he  goes  back  to  the  year  1872  and  once 
more  chronicles  an  epoch  that  has  passed  and  a  dis 
tinct  species  of  men  that  is  passing.  The  best  pic 
ture  of  the  riverman  is  in  The  Blazed  Trail: 
"  His  eye  was  distinctly  humorous  and  the  smile  of 
his  face  was  a  challenge  ...  in  the  last  month  he 
had  faced  almost  certain  death  a  dozen  times  a  day. 
He  had  ridden  logs  down  the  rapids  where  a  loss  of 
balance  meant  in  one  instant  a  ducking  and  in  the 
next  a  blow  on  the  head  from  some  following  batter 
ing  ram ;  he  had  tugged  and  strained  and  jerked  with 
his  peavey  under  a  sheer  wall  of  tangled  timber 
twenty  feet  high  —  behind  which  pressed  the  full 
power  of  the  freshet  ...  he  had  pried  at  the  key 
log  in  the  rollways  on  the  bank  until  the  whole  pile 
had  begun  to  rattle  down  into  the  river  like  a  cascade, 
and  had  jumped  or  ridden  or  even  dived  out  of  danger 
at  the  last  second.  In  a  hundred  passes  he  has  jug 
gled  with  death  as  a  child  plays  with  a  rubber  bal 
loon.  .  .  . 

"  No  wonder  that  he  fears  no  man,  since  nature's 
most  terrible  forces  of  the  flood  have  hurled  a  thou 
sand  weapons  at  him  in  vain.  His  muscles  have  been 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          273 

hardened,  his  eye  is  quiet  and  sure,  his  courage  is 
undaunted,  and  his  movements  are  as  quick  and  accu 
rate  as  a  panther's.  Probably  nowhere  in  the  world 
is  a  more  dangerous  man  of  his  hands  than  the  river- 
man.  He  would  rather  fight  than  eat,  especially 
when  he  is  drunk,  as,  like  the  cowboy,  he  usually  is 
when  he  gets  to  town." 

Obviously  a  man  who  can  control  men  like  these 
must  be  a  man  himself  in  the  full  sense  of  the  word. 
Jack  Orde  fills  the  bill.  He  is  about  thirty  years  old 
when  we  first  make  his  acquaintance  at  a  dam  on  a 
northern  river,  where  a  moss-back  farmer  and  re 
ligious  fanatic  has  hung  up  his  drive  of  logs  at  the 
height  of  a  spring  freshet  with  the  help  of  a  shotgun, 
a  sheriff's  posse  and  a  company  of  state  troops. 
Orde  sends  his  men  in  squads  of  six  to  break  down  the 
dam  and  keeps  the  main  body  and  himself  out  of  sight. 
When  the  jail  is  full  and  the  sheriff  tired  of  arrest 
ing  non-resisting  workers  on  the  instalment  plan,  the 
troops  arrive  and  find  they  have  no  legal  standing. 
They  go  home  and  Orde  clinches  the  matter  by  build 
ing  a  dam  of  his  own  and  threatening  to  flood  out  the 
farmer  and  the  grain  stored  in  his  mill. 

In  this  way  he  meets  Joseph  Newmark,  a  young 
man  from  New  York,  who  knows  something  about 
stock  exchange  transactions,  and  who  has  come  West 
to  invest  a  small  fortune  recently  left  to  him.  It  oc 
curs  to  Newmark  that  if  he  and  Orde  can  get  the  con 
tract  for  driving  all  the  logs  on  the  river,  the  big 
manufacturers  can  materially  reduce  their  working 
forces,  and  money  will  be  made  or  saved  by  all  con 
cerned.  The  proposition  looks  good  to  Orde,  and 
within  a  few  days  they  manage  to  secure  the  majority 


274     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  the  contracts  for  the  next  year.  About  this  time 
Orde  meets  Carroll  Bishop,  also  from  New  York, 
whom  he  marries  six  months  later. 

At  the  end  of  the  summer's  preliminary  work  in  the 
woods,  he  goes  to  New  York  and  calls  at  the  Bishop's 
house  on  the  evening  of  his  arrival.  The  next  morn 
ing  he  gets  a  note  from  Carroll  asking  him  to  come 
early  that  same  morning.  He  arrives  at  nine  o'clock, 
waits  three-quarters  of  an  hour  and  meets  the  fam 
ily  at  breakfast.  It  presently  appears  that  Mrs. 
Bishop,  who  is  equally  interested  in  society  and  church 
work,  is  the  pivot  around  which  the  house  and  all  in 
it  revolve.  Her  husband,  a  retired  army  officer,  is 
inclined  to  like  Orde  from  the  start.  Carroll's  old 
est  brother,  who  has  money  of  his  own  and  doesn't  do 
much  beside  live  on  it,  also  goes  over  to  Orde's  side 
after  an  impromptu  boxing  match  at  his  Athletic 
Club  in  which  the  professional  trainer  is  knocked  out 
by  the  river  man. 

About  two  weeks  later  Orde  and  Carroll  are  mar 
ried  in  the  presence  of  her  brother  and  two  girl 
friends  at  a  neighboring  rectory.  Just  before  the 
ceremony,  Gerald  Bishop  makes  a  brief  address  to  the 
prospective  bride  and  groom  which  embodies  suc 
cinctly  the  author's  views  with  regard  to  matrimony 
as  he  sees  it: 

"  There  comes  a  time  in  the  affairs  of  every  house 
hold  when  a  man  must  assert  himself  as  the  ruler. 
In  all  the  details  he  may  depend  on  the  woman's  judg 
ment,  experience  and  knowledge,  but  when  it  comes 
to  the  big  crises  where  life  is  deflected  into  one  chan 
nel  or  the  other,  then,  unless  the  man  does  the  decid 
ing,  he  is  lost  forever,  and  his  happiness,  and  the  hap- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          275 

piness  of  those  that  depend  on  him.  .  .  .  The  gen 
eral  would  have  made  a  name  for  himself  in  the  army, 
—  his  wife  demanded  his  retirement ;  he  retired ;  and 
his  career  ended." 

Mrs.  Bishop,  who  is  in  the  habit  of  becoming  hys 
terical  when  it  serves  her  purposes,  refuses  to  see 
Orde  or  Carroll.  They  pack  up  and  go  back  West 
to  work. 

Orde  and  Newmark  have  their  business  enemies. 
Nature  as  well  as  man  keeps  them  at  work  fighting 
hard  and  successfully  for  eight  years,  during  which 
Newmark,  who  controls  the  business  end  of  the  firm, 
plays  fair  with  Orde. 

Orde  foresees  the  end  of  logging  in  Michigan.  He 
decides  to  buy  a  large  tract  of  timber  in  California 
in  order  that  his  son  may  take  up  his  father's  work 
before  the  latter  lays  it  down.  He  has  to  borrow 
money  from  the  firm  to  buy  this  tract.  Newmark 
sees  his  chance.  He  gets  a  hold  on  Heinzman,  one 
of  the  firm's  largest  business  rivals,  and  arranges 
with  him  to  wreck  the  firm  and  Orde's  private  re 
sources,  and  to  save  a  correspondingly  large  stake 
for  himself. 

Carroll  Orde  nurses  Heinzman's  daughter  through 
an  attack  of  smallpox.  Her  father  dies  of  the  dis 
ease,  but  not  before  Orde  has  learned  of  the  plot 
against  him.  Orde  gets  Newmark  alone,  convinces 
him  that  he  is  able  to  send  him  to  the  penitentiary, 
and  then  lets  him  off  with  the  worst  thrashing  of  his 
life. 

In  the  volume  thus  barely  skeletonized  we  have  the 
strongest  and  most  convincing  statement  of  the  asso 
ciation  and  final  falling  out  of  two  business  partners 


276     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

that  has  yet  appeared  in  American  fiction.  Henry 
K.  Webster's  Roger  Drake,  Captam  of  Industry 
and  Will  Payne's  The  Losing  Game  may  be  men 
tioned  in  the  same  class ;  but  the  character  of  the  work 
described,  and  the  intensity  of  the  interest  in  the 
things  that  are  done  as  well  as  in  the  men  who  do 
them,  makes  The  Riverman  immeasurably  the  more 
significant  and  important  book.  There  is  less  fresh 
ness  of  interest,  less  reliance  on  description  for  de 
scription's  sake  than  one  finds  in  The  Blazed  Trail, 
but  at  the  same  time  the  average  reader  comes  to 
feel  that  the  author  has  got  closer  to  life. 

Considered  technically,  it  shows  a  comparative  ab 
sence  of  artifice  that  denotes  a  corresponding  advance 
in  the  writer's  art. 

In  other  respects  The  Riverman  may  be  con 
sidered  chiefly  as  a  prologue  to  The  Rules  of  the 
Game,  1910.  This  last,  and  in  its  scope  and  signifi 
cance  most  important  of  Mr.  White's  novels,  runs  to 
over  six  hundred  pages,  and  readily  repays  a  second 
careful  reading  of  fully  five  hundred  and  ninety-nine 
of  them. 

As  in  The  Blazed  Trail,  the  trees  stand  so  thick 
at  a  first  approach  that  we  cannot  see  the  forest. 
The  first  impression  may  be  that  the  book  is  too  long ; 
the  second  that  it  is  not  long  enough.  The  book  deals 
with  the  theory  and  practice  of  conservation,  and 
with  the  national  forest  service  in  our  national  for 
ests  of  California.  It  transcends  noticeably  the 
scope  of  Hamlin  Garland's  Cavanagh,  Forest  Ranger, 
which  entered  the  same  territory  slightly  earlier. 

It  is  distinctly  polemic  in  its  tone  and  purpose. 
In  this  sense  it  may  be  compared  with  the  most  sue- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         277 

cessful  of  Zola's  series  of  the  Four  Gospels ;  it  is  more 
educational,  more  inspiring,  and  far  more  human  and 
intimately  interesting  than  any  of  the  later  works  of 
the  French  master;  it  interests  us  for  their  own 
sake  in  the  people  who  are  the  mouthpieces  and  inter 
preters  of  the  author's  ideas ;  it  makes  us  want  to 
know  more  of  them  and  of  the  work  on  which  they 
have  enlisted;  it  makes  us  hope  that  before  long  we 
shall. 

It  is  divided  into  five  parts.  In  the  first  we  meet 
with  Orde,  Junior,  first  introduced  to  the  reading 
public  in  a  book  for  boys,  The  Adventures  of  Bobby 
Orde.  Bob  Orde  gets  into  the  game  shortly  after 
Thanksgiving  in  the  year  1898,  after  he  has  coached 
his  university  football  team,  captained  by  him  the 
year  before,  to  a  victory  as  overwhelming,  in  spite 
of  the  scarcity  of  seasoned  material,  as  that  achieved 
by  his  own  veterans  in  '97. 

He  goes  to  the  Chicago  office  of  a  business  associate 
of  his  father,  is  given  interminable  lists  of  timber 
descriptions  to  copy  and  verify,  and  finds  himself  a 
round  peg  in  a  square  hole  from  the  start.  He  is 
given  a  second  trial  in  an  office  nearer  the  scene  of 
operations  in  Michigan.  This  time  he  loses  his  job 
unconditionally  through  an  inherent  inaptitude  for 
office  work. 

He  goes  into  the  woods  and  meets  Welton,  his  fath 
er's  partner,  on  a  lumber  trail.  They  take  to  one  an 
other  from  the  start.  He  is  invited  to  go  up  with 
Welton  to  oversee  the  nearest  drive,  and  to  find  out 
how  the  work  of  getting  out  the  logs  is  actually  done. 
During  Welton's  absence  the  woods  foreman  gets 
drunk,  and  the  drive  is  about  to  be  hung  up  at  a  mo- 


278     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ment  when  the  loss  of  a  few  hours'  time  means  the 
possible  failure  of  the  whole  work  for  the  year. 

Bob  Orde  jumps  into  the  breach,  roundly  thrashes 
the  drunken  foreman  on  his  return  from  his  debauch, 
secures  and  keeps  the  loyalty  of  the  men  in  spite  of  his 
ignorance  of  local  conditions  (through  experience 
gained  on  the  football  field),  brings  temporary  order 
out  of  chaos,  and  is  given  a  permanent  place  on  the 
payrolls  of  the  company  when  Welton  reappears. 
Before  long  he  is  put  in  sole  charge  of  the  last  clean 
ing  up  operations  in  Michigan,  and,  during  his  last 
two  years  there,  manages  to  show  a  fair  profit  on  the 
credit  side  of  the  balance  sheet. 

In  February,  1902,  he  and  Welton  start  for  Cali 
fornia,  where  he  is  not  aware  that  he  owns  400,000,- 
000  feet  of  timber  purchased  for  him  by  his  father 
thirty  years  before.  On  the  train  he  meets  Baker, 
'93,  who  has  seen  him  play  football  on  a  visit  to  their 
Alma  Mater,  and  who  is  the  head  of  one  of  the  largest 
water  and  power  companies  in  California. 

Baker  is  a  new  type  of  big  business  men  and  com 
paratively  honest  grafter  of  the  sort  more  super 
ficially  and  less  successfully  illustrated  in  Get  Rich 
Quick  Wallmgford. 

On  their  arrival  in  California  Welton  goes  direct  to 
the  logging  camp.  Orde  takes  a  few  days  off  in  Los 
Angeles  with  Baker;  gets  an  inside  view  from  that 
worthy  exponent  of  the  get-rich-quick  methods  of 
psychics,  clairvoyants,  painless  dentists,  wave  motors, 
water  motors,  solar  motors,  promoters,  stock  jobbers, 
real  estate  agents  and  others  of  the  tribe ;  receives  Ba 
ker's  parting  estimate  that  for  all  its  tall  buildings 
and  other  modern  improvements  the  city  is  still  noth- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          279 

ing  more  or  less  than  a  frontier  town ;  cruises  round  by 
himself  through  the  orange  country  of  Riverside,  Red- 
lands  and  San  Bernardino;  visits  San  Diego  and 
Santa  Barbara,  and  within  the  month  rejoins  Welton 
at  headquarters  in  the  high  Sierras. 

On  the  night  of  his  arrival  at  Sycamore  Flats  he 
becomes  acquainted  with  Henry  Plant,  Forest  Super 
visor.  Plant  is  a  product  of  the  old  conditions,  when 
the  forest  service  was  a  refuge  for  consumptives,  in 
competents,  loafers  and  grafters ;  and  he  is  himself  a 
distinguished  representative  of  the  last  three  classes. 

Plant  has  just  heard  of  a  forest  fire  near  Stone 
Creek.  Three  of  his  rangers  are  playing  poker  in 
the  nearest  saloon.  One  of  them  grumbles  at  having 
to  cross  the  range  at  night  on  what  may  prove  to  be 
a  false  alarm.  Plant  says  he  will  send  instead  Cali 
fornia  John,  an  old  ex-soldier  and  former  prospector, 
if  he  can  find  him.  He  is  found  and  rides  away. 
Orde  meets  Welton  and  learns  that  their  own  timber  is 
in  the  neighborhood  threatened.  They  go  together 
to  interview  Plant.  Plant  insists  that  he  hasn't 
enough  men  to  fight  fire  properly,  and  that  one  thou 
sand  dollars  will  pay  for  the  services  of  a  good  many 
for  a  long  time.  The  bribe  is  not  forthcoming  from 
Welton  at  that  particular  time. 

Later,  when  their  flume  and  logging  rights  are  dis 
puted,  and  Plant  threatens  to  practically  shut  down 
the  work  for  the  wrhole  summer  because  it  is  too  late 
to  communicate  with  Washington  and  to  comply  with 
official  red  tape  at  headquarters,  Baker  appears. 
Welton  is  induced  to  bet  Baker  a  thousand  dollars 
that  the  matter  can't  be  squared  immediately.  Wel 
ton  writes  his  check,  hands  it  to  Baker,  and  gets  his 


280     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

temporary  permit  soon  after,  without  asking  further 
questions. 

In  the  meantime  the  lumber  company  has  rented  the 
grazing  rights  for  sheep  on  its  own  land  to  one  Peter 
Lejeune  for  the  current  year.  Lejeune  has  had 
trouble  with  Plant  before.  This  year  he  refuses  to 
hand  over  the  petty  graft  that  Plant  demands.  Plant 
refuses  him  a  permit  to  cross  government  land  on  the 
way  to  the  Wolverine  Company's  holding.  Acting 
on  instructions  from  Welton,  who  has  no  sympathy 
with  Government  forest  restrictions  of  any  sort,  Le 
jeune  runs  his  sheep  across  by  night. 

At  first  Orde  is  inclined  to  take  Welton's  view  of 
things  unreservedly.  Later,  in  the  course  of  his  own 
work,  he  becomes  better  acquainted  with  California 
John  and  others  of  the  new  element  among  the  ran 
gers,  and  his  views  begin  to  change. 

Injustice  to  the  local  cattle  men,  who  are  all  com 
paratively  small  owners,  has  much  to  do  with  this. 
Plant  stands  in  with  the  large  owners  from  the  plains 
below,  who  fatten  their  cattle  in  the  winter  and  send 
them  up  into  the  mountains  to  live  through  the  sum 
mer  anyhow.  The  mountain  men,  on  the  contrary, 
have  been  accustomed  to  getting  their  cattle  into  con 
dition  for  the  market  on  the  upland  pastures  during 
the  hot  weather  on  the  plains  below. 

Heretofore  there  has  been  room  and  forage  for 
all.  Now,  through  the  illegal  entry  of  sheep  on  per 
mits  sold  by  Plant  at  ten  dollars  apiece,  conditions 
have  materially  altered,  and  the  local  men  are  driven 
to  something  close  to  desperation. 

The  law  states  plainly  that  local  small  holders  shall 
be  favored  in  such  cases  at  the  expense  of  larger  cat- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         281 

tlemen  from  farther  off.  Its  enforcement  rests,  how 
ever,  with  Plant,  who  continues  to  follow  the  line  of 
least  resistance  and  largest  graft. 

Before  the  year  is  over,  he  is  shot  by  George  Pol 
lock,  whose  cattle  are  unfit  for  sale,  whose  wife  dies 
because  he  has  no  money  to  get  a  doctor  up  from 
below  at  fifty  dollars  a  visit,  and  who  firmly  believes 
that  Plant  has  murdered  the  woman  and  her  child  as 
surely  as  if  he  had  done  it  at  the  pistol's  point. 

Orde  sees  the  shooting  by  chance  and  helps  Pollock 
to  get  away.  He  is  himself  seen  by  Oldham,  who  is 
in  Baker's  employ,  and  who  was  previously  known  in 
the  East  as  Newmark,  Orde  Senior's  former  partner. 

In  the  meantime  Thorne,  inspector  in  the  forest 
service,  who  has  made  a  reputation  by  running  down 
graft  and  grafters  in  Oregon,  arrives.  California 
John  and  others,  including  Plant  himself,. help  him  to 
size  up  the  situation.  He  sends  a  report  to  Washing 
ton  demanding  Plant's  discharge.  This  report  is  side 
tracked  for  political  reasons ;  and  Thorne,  convinced 
that  he  can  do  nothing  further  as  long  as  the  present 
head  of  the  Service  at  Washington  is  in  charge,  re 
signs  and  goes  back  to  Oregon  as  a  landlooker. 

After  Plant's  death,  California  John  is  made  su 
pervisor  in  his  place.  Orde  gets  to  see  more  of  the 
man,  who  begins  to  be  looked  up  to  as  Supervisor 
Davidson,  and  from  him  and  others  he  gets  various 
interesting  details  of  the  old  regime. 

"  Ross  Fletcher  is  a  ranger  because  he  loves  it  and 
believes  in  it.  ...  Why,  let  me  tell  you  that  last 
spring  Ross  was  fighting  fire  all  alone,  and  he  went  out 
for  help  and  they  docked  him  a  day  for  being  off  the 
reserve.  .  .  .  And  they  sent  him  in  after  sheep  in 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  high  mountains  early,  when  the  feed  was  froze, 
and  wouldn't  allow  him  pay  for  three  sacks  of  barley 
for  his  animals.  And  Ross  gets  sixty  dollars  a  month, 
and  he  spends  about  half  of  that  for  trail  tools  and 
fire  tools  that  they  won't  give  him.  What  do  you 
think  of  that?  Charley  Morton  was  ordered  to  Yo- 
semite  to  consult  with  the  military  officers  there.  He 
was  instructed  to  do  so  within  a  certain  number  of 
days.  To  keep  inside  his  time  limit  he  had  to  hire  a 
team.  .  .  .  Item  refused. 

"  One  of  the  inspiring  things  in  the  later  history 
of  the  great  West  is  the  faith  and  insight,  the  devo 
tion  and  self-sacrifice  of  some  of  the  rough  mountain 
men  in  some  few  of  the  badly  managed  reserves  to 
truths  that  were  but  slowly  being  recognized  by  even 
the  better  educated  of  the  East.  These  men,  year 
after  year,  without  leadership,  without  encourage 
ment,  without  the  support  and  against  the  covert  or 
open  hostility  of  their  neighbors  .  .  .  had  no  wide 
theory  of  forestry  to  sustain  their  interest ;  they  cer 
tainly  could  have  little  hope  of  promotion  or  advance 
ment  to  a  real  career ;  their  experience  with  a  bureau 
cratic  government  could  not  arouse  in  their  breasts 
any  expectation  of  a  broad  or  liberal  or  even  an  en 
lightened  policy  of  conservation  or  use.  They  were 
set  in  opposition  to  their  neighbors  without  receiving 
the  support  of  the  power  that  so  placed  them. 

"  Nevertheless,  according  to  their  knowledge,  they 
worked  faithfully.  .  .  .  Each  was  given  the  inestima 
ble  privilege  of  doing  what  he  could.  Everything 
had  to  be  reported  on  enormous  and  complicated 
forms.  If  he  made  a  mistake  in  any  of  these,  he  heard 
from  it,  and  perhaps  his  pay  was  held  up.  This  pay 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         283 

was  somewhere  about  sixty  dollars  or  seventy  dollars 
a  month  (later  raised  to  ninety  dollars),  and  he  was 
required  to  supply  his  own  horses  and  to  feed  them. 
.  .  .  The  Government  supplied  next  to  nothing.  In 
1902,  between  the  King's  River  and  the  Kaweah,  an 
area  of  somewhere  near  a  million  acres,  the  complete 
inventory  of  fire-fighting  tools  consisted  of  two  rakes 
made  from  fifty  cents'  worth  of  twenty-penny 
nails." 

In  the  long  run,  his  monthly  reports  get  the  best 
of  California  John.  Before  the  order  comes  from 
Washington  superseding  him  as  supervisor,  he  puts 
an  end  to  the  raids  of  the  sheep  men.  His  instruc 
tions  permit  him  to  put  any  flock  caught  on  govern 
ment  land  off  the  reservation.  They  do  not  say  where 
he  shall  put  them  off.  After  he  has  driven  several 
flocks  out  on  the  barren  eastern  side  of  the  mountains 
into  what  is  equivalent  to  destruction,  the  sheep  men 
begin  to  seek  pastures  new  elsewhere. 

Thorpe,  who  has  rejoined  the  service  and  who  has 
been  appointed  supervisor  in  his  place,  persuades  Da 
vidson  to  stay  on  as  head  ranger  under  him.  Thorne 
brings  a  sister  with  him,  who  serves  as  his  clerk  with 
out  wages ;  also  as  his  housekeeper,  cook  and  gardener 
when  other  help  is  not  to  be  had,  which  is  most  of  the 
time. 

Shortly  after  Orde  becomes  acquainted  with  her,  he 
decides  to  join  the  service  himself.  "  The  charlatan 
had  babbled  ;  but  without  knowing  it  he  had  given  Bob 
what  he  sought.  .  .  .  Why  had  he  been  dissatisfied 
with  business  opportunities  and  successes  beyond  the 
hopes  of  most  young  men?  .  .  .  What  right  had  he 
to  condemn  as  insufficient  nine-tenths  of  those  in  the 


284     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

industrial  world,  and  yet  what  else  but  condemnation 
did  his  attitude  of  mind  imply  .  .  .  ? 

"  He  was  dissatisfied  because  it  was  not  his  work. 
The  other  honest  and  sincere  men,  such  as  his  father 
and  Welton,  had  been  satisfied  because  it  was  their 
work.  The  old  generation,  the  one  that  was  passing, 
needed  just  that  kind  of  service.  Bob  belonged  to  the 
new  generation.  He  saw  that  new  things  were  to  be 
demanded.  The  modern  young  men  of  energy  and 
force  and  strong  ability  had  a  different  task  from  that 
which  their  fathers  had  accomplished.  The  wilderness 
was  subdued,  the  pioneer  work  of  industry  was  finished, 
the  hard  brute  struggle  to  shape  things  to  efficiency 
was  over.  It  had  been  necessary  to  get  things  done. 
Now  it  was  becoming  necessary  to  perfect  the  means 
and  methods  of  doing.  Lumber  must  still  be  cut, 
streams  must  still  be  dammed ;  railroads  must  still  be 
built ;  but  now  the  pioneers,  the  men  of  fire,  had  blazed 
the  way,  others  could  follow.  Methods  were  estab 
lished.  It  was  all  a  business  like  the  selling  of  gro 
ceries.  The  industrial  rank  and  file  could  attend  to 
details.  The  men  who  thought  and  struggled  and 
carried  the  torch  —  they  must  go  beyond  what  their 
fathers  had  accomplished. 

"  Now  Bob  understood  Amy  Thome's  pride  in  the 
Service.  .  .  .  Thorne  was  in  the  current.  With  his 
pitiful  eighteen  hundred  dollars  a  year  he  was  still 
swimming  strongly  in  new  waters.  His  business  went 
the  little  necessary  step  beyond.  It  not  only  earned 
him  his  living  in  the  world  but  it  helped  the  race  move 
ment  of  his  people.  At  present  the  living  was  small, 
just  as  at  first  the  pioneer  opening  the  country  had 
wrested  but  a  scanty  livelihood  from  the  stubborn 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          285 

wilderness ;  nevertheless  .  .  .  Bob  looked  about  the 
mill  yard  with  an  understanding  eye.  This  work  was 
necessary ;  but  it  was  not  his  work." 

Thorne  understands  how  he  feels.  He  had  worked 
out  the  same  line  of  thought  for  himself  long  before. 
To  California  John  the  matter  had  been  one  to  take 
for  granted.  Orde  joins  the  Service  as  a  supernumer 
ary,  for  the  summer.  He  is  set  to  painting  the  office 
roof,  and  to  stringing  barbed  wire  fence.  He  cuts 
down  dead  trees,  saws  them  into  lengths  and  splits 
them  by  boring  holes  in  them  and  setting  off  giant 
powder  in  the  holes. 

After  that  he  learns  to  fight  fire.  When  he  has 
become  proficient  in  this  and  has  passed  his  entrance 
examinations  in  the  fall,  like  others  of  the  best  men  he 
is  taught  to  specialize.  At  the  business  of  estimating 
the  value  of  the  lumber  on  Government  land  he  needs 
little  teaching.  While  engaged  in  this  work  he  runs 
across  George  Pollock,  who  has  returned  from  Mexico, 
and  who  has  been  living  for  some  time  in  hiding  near 
his  old  home. 

Orde  gives  him  money  to  pay  for  the  best  lawyer 
in  the  neighborhood  and  advises  him  to  go  home  and 
either  give  himself  up,  or  settle  down  again  as  if  noth 
ing  had  happened.  There  is  no  direct  evidence 
against  him.  One  supposition  is  that  Pollock  left  the 
place  after  his  wife's  death  without  knowing  anything 
about  the  shooting  of  Plant.  The  result  is  that  he 
is  allowed  to  live  in  peace  in  his  old  home  for  the  time 
being. 

One  result  of  Orde's  survey  is  his  discovery  that 
Baker's  power  company  has  unlawfully  acquired 
many  of  its  holdings.  Shortly  after  this  he  is  sent  to 


£86      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

see  what  diplomacy  can  do  with  a  squatter  by  the 
name  of  Samuels,  whose  title  to  an  old  homestead 
claim  has  been  found  defective.  Samuels  has  threat 
ened  to  shoot  at  sight  the  first  ranger  that  ap 
proaches  his  house. 

Orde  rides  up  to  the  house  towards  sundown  and 
asks  for  supper  and  a  night's  lodging.  He  reminds 
his  unwilling  host  that  the  Wolverine  Lumber  Com 
pany  has  frequently  done  as  much  for  Samuels  and  his 
friends.  After  supper  Samuels  is  gradually  lured 
from  a  position  of  armed  fanaticism  to  a  statement  of 
his  wrongs  as  he  sees  them.  He  is  willing  to  talk 
about  graft  in  San  Francisco  as  well  as  in  the  forest 
service. 

Orde  sums  up:  "  '  Graft,'  he  concluded,  '  is  just 
the  price  the  people  are  willing  to  pay  to  get  their 
politics  done  for  them  —  while  they  attend  to  the 
pressing  business  of  development  and  building.  They 
haven't  time  or  energy  to  do  everything,  so  they  are 
willing  to  pay  to  have  some  things  taken  off  their 
hands.  The  price  is  graft.  When  the  people  have 
more  time,  when  the  other  things  are  done,  the  price 
will  be  too  high.  They'll  decide  to  attend  to  their  own 
business.'  ' 

Orde  argues  with  Samuels  till  sunrise,  and  wears 
him  down  gradually.  Finally  Samuels  signs  a  renun 
ciation  of  his  claim.  Something  warns  Orde  to  get 
away  as  quickly  and  noiselessly  as  he  can.  As  he 
rides  into  the  forest  he  turns  back  and  sees  the  old 
man  with  a  gun  looking  for  him. 

Raker  meets  Orde  in  the  woods  near  the  latter's 
camp  and  asks  what  Orde  is  going  to  do  about  prose 
cuting  the  case  against  Baker's  Company.  Orde  says 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          287 

he  has  no  right  to  talk  about  Government  business 
and  Baker  goes  away  drawing  his  own  conclusions. 
Baker  sends  Oldham  to  interview  Orde.  The  former 
states  the  case  for  big  business  against  Government 
restriction  fluently  and  persuasively.  Orde  remains 
obdurate.  Oldham  offers  him  a  bribe  of  one  hundred 
thousand  dollars  of  the  Company's  stock,  and  a  sal 
aried  position  in  the  field.  Orde  refuses,  and  Old- 
ham  finally  asserts  that  much  of  Welton's  own  timber 
holdings  have  been  acquired  fraudulently,  and  de 
parts,  leaving  the  papers  that  seem  to  justify  his 
claim. 

Later  Orde  is  told  that  if  he  does  not  recede  from 
his  stand,  Welton  will  be  indicted  for  bribing  Plant, 
and  that  he  himself,  by  fair  means  or  foul,  will  be  pre 
vented  from  testifying  at  the  trial  —  if  necessary  will 
be  indicted  as  an  accessory  after  the  fact  in  the  mur 
der  of  Plant  by  George  Pollock.  Shortly  after  this 
Orde  is  lassoed  by  a  professional  gun  man  who  has 
been  seen  in  Oldham's  company  more  than  once,  and 
taken  to  a  deserted  mining  camp  in  the  heart  of  the 
Sierras.  After  a  captivity  of  five  days  and  nights 
he  manages  to  escape  by  a  trick  that  convinces  his 
captor  that  he  has  been  drowned.  On  his  way  back 
to  camp  he  meets  Oldham  and  repeats  his  father's 
words  to  the  latter :  "  I'm  going  to  give  you  the 
worst  licking  you  ever  heard  tell  o/." 

Hitherto  Oldham  has  balked  at  instructing  the  gun 
man  to  shoot  to  kill.  He  gets  away,  meets  his 
assassin  and  revises  his  instructions.  Two  days  later 
Orde,  Amy  Thorne,  and  Ware,  one  of  the  rangers 
assigned  to  him  as  a  body  guard,  take  a  walk  in  the 
woods.  Suddenly  Ware  knocks  Orde  down,  and  fires 


288     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

two  shots  from  his  revolver.  They  follow  the  gun 
man's  tracks  till  it  is  evident  that  he  has  got  away, 
and  come  upon  Oldham  lying  dead  with  a  bullet 
through  his  head. 

It  does  not  take  them  long  to  decide  that  Orde  is 
now  in  no  further  danger  of  his  life.  Baker  has  al 
ways  drawn  the  line  at  murder,  and  Oldham's  agent 
has  evidently  decamped  at  the  moment  of  his  realiza 
tion  that  there  is  no  longer  any  profit  for  him  in 
murder  without  a  paymaster.  Moreover,  Orde  has 
reason  to  believe  that  Oldham  is  the  only  one  who 
knows  of  his  connection  with  the  shooting  of  Plant. 

Orde  Senior  arrives  from  the  East  with  the  assur 
ance  that  the  titles  to  all  his  son's  timber  holdings 
are  perfectly  sound.  Baker  gives  up  his  mineral 
claims,  illegally  acquired  for  the  purpose  of  cutting 
the  timber  on  them,  and  agrees  to  leave  Welton  alone. 
At  the  time  of  Oldham's  shooting,  Bob  Orde  discovers 
that  Amy  Thorne  is  the  one  woman  in  the  world  for 
him ;  and  by  her  advice  he  consents  to  resign  from  the 
Forest  Service  and  to  take  up  his  profession  of  lum 
berman  again  without  restrictions  from  his  father  or 
Welton,  on  the  one  condition  that  the  work  shall 
show  a  fair  yearly  profit,  thereby  to  demonstrate  to 
them  and  to  the  world  at  large  that  lumbering  can 
be  made  at  once  as  profitable  in  America,  and  as  free 
from  waste  and  danger  from  fires,  as  anywhere  else 
in  the  world. 

On  the  last  page  Welton  claps  Bob  on  the  back 
and  wishes  him  success.  Previously  he  has  expressed 
his  opinion  to  Orde  Senior  that  the  kid  can't  break 
them  in  two  years  anyhow. 

"  '  I'm  too  old  at  the  game  to  believe  much  in  new 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          289 

methods  to  what  I've  been  brought  up  to,  Bob,'  said 
he,  '  but  I  believe  in  you.  If  anybody  can  do  it,  you 
can;  and  I'd  be  tickled  to  see  you  win  out.  Things 
change,  and  a  man  is  foolish  to  act  as  though  they 
didn't.  He's  just  got  to  keep  playing  alone  accord 
ing  to  the  rules  of  the  game.  And  they  keep  chang 
ing  too.  It's  good  to  have  lived  while  they  are  mak 
ing  a  country.  I've  done  it.  You're  going  to.'  ' 

It  is  possible  that  Mr.  White  had  in  mind  the 
revision  of  the  rules  of  football  from  conditions  that 
worked  to  the  advantage  of  heavy  close  formations  to 
those  favoring  more  open  play  when  he  chose  the  title 
of  this  book  and  ended  it  with  these  words.  From  the 
first  page  to  the  last,  he  is  eminently  just  to  the  claims 
of  capital  and  the  big  investors. 

"  '  I'm  a  Forest  officer,'  said  California  John,  .  .  . 
*  there  can't  nobody  beat  me  in  wishing  a  lot  of  good 
forest  land  was  under  the  Service  instead  of  due  to  be 
cut  up  by  the  lumber-man.  But  I've  lived  too  long 
not  to  see  the  point.  The  United  States  of  America 
was  big  gainers  because  those  old  fellows  had  the 
nerve  just  to  come  in  and  buy.  It  ain't  so  much  the 
lumber  they  saw  and  put  out  where  it's  needed  — 
that's  a  good  deal,  and  it  ain't  so  much  the  men  they 
bring  into  the  country  and  give  work  to  —  though 
that's  a  lot  too.  It's  the  confidence  they  inspire,  it's 
the  lead  they  give.  All  the  rest  of  these  little  oper 
ators  and  workmen  and  store-keepers  and  manufac 
turers  wouldn't  have  found  their  way  here  in  twenty 
years  if  the  big  fellows  hadn't  led  the  way.  .  .  .  And 
while  it's  the  big  fellow  that  gives  the  lead,  it's  the 
little  fellow  that  makes  the  wealth  of  the  coun 
try  .  .  .» 


290      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  '  The  Government  gives  alternate  sections  of  land 
to  railroads  to  bring  them  into  the  country,'  went 
on  California  John.  '  In  my  notion  all  this  timber 
land  in  private  hands  is  where  it  belongs.  It's  the 
price  the  Government  pays  for  wealth.' 

"  '  And  the  Basin,'  cried  Bob. 

"  '  What  the  hell  more  confidence  does  this  country 
need  now,'  demanded  California  John  fiercely ;  '  what 
with  its  mills,  and  its  trolleys,  and  its  vineyards  and 
all  its  big  projects?  What  right  has  this  man  Baker 
to  get  pay  for  what  he  ain't  done  ?  ' 

"  The  distinction  Bob  had  sensed,  but  had  not  been 
able  to  analyze,  leaped  at  him.  The  equities  hung  in 
equal  balance.  On  one  side  he  saw  the  pioneer,  press 
ing  forward  into  an  unknown  wilderness,  breaking  a 
way  for  those  that  could  follow.  .  .  .  On  the  other 
he  saw  the  plunderer  grasping  at  a  wealth  that  did 
not  belong  to  him  through  means  he  had  not  made." 

Bob  and  Amy  have  a  discussion  as  to  the  details  of 
waste  in  lumbering  just  before  he  joins  the  Forest 
Service.  Bob  is  inclined  to  do  full  justice  to  the 
professional  and  commercial  side  of  the  argument: 

"  '  We've  got  to  have  lumber,  haven't  we  ?  And 
somebody  has  got  to  cut  and  supply  it.  Men  like  Mr. 
Welton  are  doing  it  by  methods  that  they've  found 
effective.  They  are  working  for  the  Present;  we  of 
the  new  generation  want  to  work  for  the  Future. 
It's  a  fair  division.  Somebody's  got  to  attend  to 
them  both.' 

"  '  Why  don't  you  log  with  some  reference  to  the 
future  then  ?  '  demanded  Amy. 

"  '  Because  it  doesn't  pay,'  stated  Bob  deliberately. 
.  .  .  'Yes,'  said  Bob  mildly,  <  Why  not?  The  lum- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          291 

ber-man  fulfills  a  commercial  function,  like  anyone 
else;  why  shouldn't  he  be  allowed  freely  a  commer 
cial  reward?  You  can't  lead  a  commercial  class  by 
ideals  that  absolutely  conflict  with  commercial  mo 
tives.  If  you  want  to  introduce  your  ideals  among 
lumber-men  you  want  to  educate  them;  and  in  order 
to  educate  them  you  must  fix  it  so  your  ideals  don't 
actually  spell  loss !  Rearrange  the  scheme  of  taxa 
tion  for  one  thing.  Get  your  ideas  of  fire  protection 
and  conservation  on  a  practical  basis.  It's  all  very 
well  to  talk  about  how  nice  it  would  be  to  chop  up 
all  the  waste  tops  and  pile  them  like  cord  wood.  .  .  . 
It  would  certainly  be  neat  and  effective.' 

"  '  But  can't  you  get  some  scheme  that  would  be 
just  as  effective,  but  not  so  neat?  ' 

"  '  It's  the  difference  between  a  yacht  and  a  lum 
ber  schooner.  .  .  .  We've  got  to  make  it  so  easy  to 
do  things  right  that  anybody  at  all  decent  will  be 
ashamed  not  to.  Then  we've  got  to  wait  for  the 
spirit  of  the  people  to  grow  to  new  things.  It's  com 
ing,  but  it's  not  here  yet.' 

"  '  But  you  can  educate  people,  can't  you  ?  '  asked 
Amy.  .  .  .  '  Some  people  can,'  agreed  Thorne.  .  .  . 
'  But  Mr.  Orde  is  right ;  it's  only  the  spirit  of  the 
people  that  can  bring  about  new  things.  We  think 
we  hare  leaders,  but  we  have  only  interpreters. 
When  the  time  is  ripe  to  change  things,  then ,  the 
spirit  of  the  people  rises  to  forbid  old  practices.  .  .  . 
There's  sure  to  come  a  time  when  it  will  not  be  too 
much  off  balance  to  require  private  firms  to  do  things 
according  to  our  methods.  Then  it  will  pay  to  log 
the  Government  forests  on  an  extensive  scale;  and 
private  forests  will  have  to  come  to  our  way  of  doing 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

things.  .  .  .  '  Never  kick  a  pup  for  chasing  rabbits 
until  you're  ready  to  teach  him  to  chase  deer,'  put  in 
California  John." 

As  a  conservation  tract,  the  book's  circulation  has 
already  demonstrated  its  success.  It  claims  frankly 
to  be  educational  and  it  is  so ;  simply,  forcibly,  con 
vincingly,  in  the  most  obvious  and  restricted  sense. 
It  is  educational  and  inspiring  in  a  larger  and  a  na 
tional  sense ;  it  may  fairly  be  considered  so  in  a  lit 
erary  one.  Mr.  White,  like  the  men  and  women  he 
has  to  do  with,  is  too  much  concerned  with  the  work 
in  hand  to  indulge  in  the  extravagance  of  fine  writ 
ing. 

The  Los  Angeles  episode,  which  may  seem  to  many 
an  excrescence  judged  from  a  purely  literary  point  of 
view,  serves  to  clinch  the  author's  point,  made  with 
less  detail  later,  that  it  is  the  little  grafters  that 
make  the  big  ones,  quite  as  much  as  the  reverse. 

The  whole  book  is  national  in  scope,  the  same  con 
siderations  that  have  to  do  with  the  people's  interest 
in  the  work  of  the  lumber-man  may  with  equal  force 
be  applied  to  railroading  and  all  public  utilities. 
Judged  broadly  —  in  order  to  make  the  rules  of  the 
game  apply,  in  order  to  secure  a  square  deal  in  their 
interpretation  —  the  Los  Angeles  section  is  quite  as 
necessary  as  the  rest. 

So  with  Part  One,  which  deals  with  Bob  Orde's 
first  formative  period  in  Michigan  and  which  sets 
forth  conclusively  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  do  not 
know  The  Blazed  Trail  and  The  Riverman,  the  condi 
tions  and  the  forces  which  have  evolved  men  of  the 
older  generation  like  Welton  and  his  father. 

A  page  or  two  from  this  part  of  the  book  merits 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         293 

quotation  merely  for  reasons  of  local  color  and  lit 
erary  quality: 

"  But  now  suddenly  his  sauntering  brought  him  to 
the  water-front.  The  tramway  ended  in  a  long  plat 
form  running  parallel  to  the  edge  of  the  docks  below. 
There  were  many  little  cars  both  in  the  process  of  un 
loading  and  waiting  their  turn.  The  place  swarmed 
with  men,  all  busily  engaged  in  handing  the  boards 
from  one  to  another  as  buckets  are  passed  at  a  fire. 
At  each  point  where  an  unending  stream  of  them 
passed  over  the  side  of  each  ship,  stood  a  young  man 
with  a  long,  flexible  rule.  This  he  laid  rapidly  along 
the  width  of  each  board,  and  then  as  rapidly  entered 
a  mark  in  a  note-book.  The  boards  seemed  to  move 
fairly  of  their  own  volition  like  a  scutellate  monster 
of  many  joints,  crawling  from  the  cars,  across  the 
dock,  over  the  sides  of  the  ship,  and  into  the  black 
hold,  where  presumably  it  coiled.  There  were  six 
ships ;  six  many-jointed  monsters  creeping  to  their 
appointed  places  under  the  urging  of  these  their 
masters ;  six  young  men  absorbed  and  busy  at  the 
tallying;  six  crews  panoplied  in  leather,  guiding  the 
monsters  to  their  lairs.  Here,  too,  the  sun-warmed 
air  rose  sluggish  with  the  aroma  of  pitch,  of  lumber, 
of  tar  from  the  ship's  cordage,  of  the  wetness  of  un- 
painted  wood.  Aloft  in  the  rigging,  clear  against 
the  sky,  were  sailors  in  contrast  of  peaceful  leisurely 
industry  to  those  who  toiled  and  hurried  below.  The 
masts  swayed  gently,  describing  an  arc  against  the 
heavens.  The  sailors  swung  easily  to  the  motion. 
From  below  came  the  quick  dull  sounds  of  planks 
thrown  down,  the  grind  of  car  wheels,  the  movement 
of  feet,  the  varied,  complex  sound  of  men  working 


294     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

together,  the  clapping  of  waters  against  the  struc 
ture.  It  was  confusing,  confusing  as  the  noise  of 
many  hammers.  Yet  two  things  seemed  to  steady 
it,  to  confine  it,  to  keep  it  in  the  bounds  of  order,  to 
prevent  it  from  usurping  more  than  its  meet  and 
proper  proportion.  One  was  the  tingling  lake  breeze 
singing  through  the  rigging  of  the  ship;  the  other 
was  the  idle  and  intermittent  whistling  of  one  of  the 
sailors  up  aloft.  And  suddenly,  as  though  it  had 
but  just  commenced,  Bob  again  became  aware  of  the 
saw  shrieking  in  ecstasy  as  it  plunged  into  a  pine 
log." 

There  is  very  little  about  modern  business  in 
American  fiction  where  so  much  is  defined  and  sug 
gested  in  as  many  words.  There  is  a  reminiscence 
of  Calumet  K,  by  Merwin  and  Webster,  where  the 
business  life  of  the  Great  Lakes  is  set  forth  pictur 
esquely  with  equal  vigor  and  more  concentrated  de 
tail,  but  Mr.  White's  is  immeasurably  the  bigger  and 
more  significant  book. 

To  many  The  Rules  of  the  Game  will  come  as 
a  new  revelation,  not  of  the  problems  confined  to 
forest  conservation  alone,  but  of  the  theory  and  prac 
tice  of  "  big  business  "  in  the  largest  and  finest  sense. 
It  attempts  to  suggest  a  practical  working  com 
promise  between  immediate  efficiency  and  the  ultimate 
square  deal  in  a  single  detail  of  our  national  expres 
sion  of  material  energy.  To  the  lay  mind,  so  far  as 
the  lumbering  business  is  concerned,  it  has  gone  far 
to  make  this  attempt  successful. 

It  has  done  more  than  that.  It  has  advertised  a 
current  national  problem  interestingly  and  compel- 
lingly.  It  has  helped  to  create  and  inspire  new  ideals 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE          295 

of  national  responsibility  and  personal  devotion.  It 
has  traced  the  mental  and  spiritual  evolution  of  Bob 
Orde  from  a  college  boy,  whose  chief  asset  is  his  foot 
ball  training  and  reputation,  to  a  recognized  leader 
in  a  new  national  and  racial  movement  for  the  good 
of  mankind  at  large.  It  has  accomplished  this  re 
sult  interestingly,  readably,  and  fairly ;  in  the  simple 
and  direct  manner  with  which  the  nature  (human  and 
inanimate)  dealt  with  in  the  book,  goes  to  work  to  ac 
complish  its  largest  results. 

The  Rules  of  the  Game  has  something  of  the 
strength  of  the  mountains  and  forests  that  inspired 
it. 

It  has  something  of  their  loftiness  and  permanency 
as  well.  Great  literature  of  th<?  first  rank,  it  does 
not  claim  to  be.  As  a  human  document  of  a  far 
higher  degree  of  artistry  than  the  average  reader  or 
conventional  critic  would  naturally  credit  it  with  on 
a  first  reading,  the  book  is  so  big  that,  like  the  moun 
tain,  we  need  time  and  a  second  glance  to  begin  to 
take  it  all  in. 

The  most  obvious  and  natural  method  is  to  set  up 
something  else  as  a  measuring  post.  Clayhanger 
by  Arnold  Bennett,  the  work  of  a  contemporary 
British  novelist  of  deserved  reputation,  which  was 
published  at  approximately  the  same  time,  happens 
to  be  of  almost  identical  length.  Clayhanger  is 
admitted  by  recognized  critics  to  be  the  work  of  a  ris 
ing  master  of  English,  and  to  be  admirable,  technic 
ally  and  otherwise,  though  both  in  material  and 
method  it  is  sharply  distinguished  from  academic 
English  fiction,  as  academic  English  fiction  continues 
to  be  written  in  England  and  elsewhere. 


296     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Claylianger  is  a  distinct  and  concentrated  study 
in  middle  class  English  personalities.  It  has  the  one 
great  merit  of  holding  the  reader's  interest  from 
cover  to  cover  while  dealing  with  material  that  seems 
at  first  glance  to  be  the  most  commonplace  in  the 
world.  As  a  work  of  limited  and  effective  art,  it  chal 
lenges  and  deserves  limited  interest  and  admiration. 

This  sort  of  thing  is  all  very  well  in  its  way.  In 
the  case  of  Clayhcmger  it  is  democratic  in  a  sense. 
Other  novelists,  before  Henry  James  and  after,  have 
helped  to  teach  us  that  a  microscopic  study  of  human 
nature  and  inanimate  life  in  any  environment  at  ex 
treme  length  may  be  profitably  studied  if  one  has  the 
time  to  spare. 

At  the  same  time  it  is  probable  that  Dickens, 
Thackeray,  Daudet  and  Balzac  at  their  best  have 
done  this  sort  of  thing  quite  as  well  and  even  better. 
On  the  whole,  in  Clayhanger  and  the  rest  of  his 
projected  trilogy,  Mr.  Bennett  gives  a  partial  im 
pression  of  reaction  rather  than  progress,  both  as  a 
man  and  as  a  writer.  Any  book  that  claims  to  be  a 
novel  of  the  first  or  second  rank  must  be  judged  not 
alone  by  its  spirit  and  inspiration,  or  the  absence 
thereof,  but  by  the  resultant  lasting  impression  in 
the  memory,  and  the  vistas  that  it  succeeds  in  open 
ing  up  or  fails  to  open. 

It  must  be  a  very  conscientious  and  retentive  reader 
of  Clayhcmger  who  remembers  more  of  the  book 
after  a  few  months  than  the  two  chief  characters,  a 
brief  dissertation  on  the  superficiality  of  British 
lower  middle  class  education,  a  frustrated  accident  in 
a  printing  office,  a  clog  dance,  certain  aspects  of 
Nonconformist  religious  hypocrisy,  certain  unpleas- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE         297 

ant  details  of  softening  of  the  brain,  an  impressionis 
tic  sketch  of  Brighton  by  night,  and  a  detailed  de 
scription  of  Clayhanger's  bedroom. 

It  may  be,  indeed,  a  triumph  of  art  to  do  so  much 
with  so  little,  but  whether  this  is  the  sort  of  art  and 
the  kind  of  fiction  that  is  best  suited  to  the  capacity 
and  the  needs  of  the  American  reading  public  of  to 
day  is  highly  questionable. 

If  beside  Clayhanger  and  his  father  we  place  Orde 
Junior  and  Orde  Senior;  if  beside  Osmead  we  place 
Baker ;  if  beside  incidental  figures  like  Big  James  and 
Clayhanger's  aunt  we  place  Roaring  Dick  of  the 
Woods  and  California  John ;  if  beside  Hilda  Lessways 
we  even  place  Amy  Thome,  then  we  begin  to  see  how 
far  in  characterization  alone  the  American  holds  his 
own  with,  and  transcends,  the  British  novelist. 

When  it  comes  to  a  question  of  general  scope  and 
power,  the  impartial  critic  and  firm  admirer  of  Mr. 
Bennett  may  fairly  conclude  that  the  significance  of 
The  Rules  of  the  Game,  compared  to  that  of  Clay- 
hanger,  is  in  something  like  the  same  proportion 
that  the  life  and  interests  of  lower  middle  class 
England,  from  printing  offices  and  potteries  of  The 
Five  Towns  to  Brighton  boarding  houses,  bears  to 
the  life  and  work  of  the  men  and  women  of  the  high 
Sierras  and  the  country  tributary  to  the  same. 

The  Rules  of  the  Game  appears  as  the  unadvertised 
third  volume  of  the  trilogy  of  American  lumbering 
begun  by  The  Blazed  Trail  and  continued  in  The 
Riverman. 

In  this  field  Mr.  White  has  shown  himself  a  pio 
neer  fit  to  continue  the  traditions  of  the  men  and 
methods  he  interprets.  It  would  seem  that  he  has 


298     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

covered  this  particular  field  fairly  thoroughly  in  his 
third  book. 

As  a  pioneer  of  the  interpretation  of  Big  Busi 
ness  in  other  fields  of  endeavor,  ultimately  for  the 
greatest  good  of  the  greatest  number,  unlimited  op 
portunity  is  still  waiting  for  him  elsewhere.  The 
rules  of  the  game  still  wait  to  be  explained  and  ap 
plied  in  railroading,  manufacturing,  mining,  finance, 
journalism,  politics  and  the  law,  and  in  various 
phases  of  municipal  and  national  ownership  and  op 
eration. 

Mr.  White  has  shown  himself  conclusively  one  of 
the  younger  generation,  who  have  already  demon 
strated  their  fitness  to  explain  and  apply  them.  And 
if  we  have  read  his  heredity  and  his  temper  right,  he 
belongs  to  the  same  breed  that  rarely  pauses  to  live 
on  past  performances  or  premature  and  incomplete 
literary  reputation ;  that,  in  other  words,  carries  each 
contract  through  to  a  finish,  while  there  is  work  that 
requires  to  be  done.  The  probabilities  are  that  he 
will  continue  on  the  job,  with  more  power  to  his  pen 
from  longer  practice,  and  that  we  shall  continue  to 
hear  from  him  even  more  inspiringly  in  the  future 
than  we  have  in  the  past. 


VII 

WINSTON  CHURCHILL  AND  CIVIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 

"The  ideals  which  for  three  hundred  years  America  and 
Europe  have  cherished,  alike  yet  apart,  are  ideals  of  morality 
and  of  government,  ...  of  right  and  of  rights.  Whoever  has 
lived  his  conscious  life  in  the  terms  of  our  language  so  satu 
rated  with  the  temper  and  the  phrases  of  both  the  English 
Bible  and  of  English  Law,  has  perforce  learned  that  how 
ever  far  he  may  stray,  he  cannot  escape  the  duty  that  bids 
us  be  right  and  maintain  our  rights."  Barrett  Wendell,  Lit 
erary  History  of  America,  1900. 

"  In  the  long  run  in  small  things  as  in  large  wrong 
choice  leads  to  death.  Death  is  simply  the  inevitable  result. 
No  republic  can  live,  no  man  can  live  in  a  republic  in  which 
wrong  is  the  repeated  choice  of  the  people  or  of  the  State. 

"  The  best  care  and  culture  of  man  is  not  that  which  re 
strains  his  weakness,  but  that  which  gives  play  to  his  strength. 
.  .  .  There  is  no  virtue  in  democracy  as  such,  nothing  in 
Americanism  as  such,  that  will  save  us  if  we  become  a  na 
tion  of  weaklings  and  fools  with  an  aristocracy  of  knaves 
for  our  masters."  David  Starr  Jordan,  The  Care  and  Cul 
ture  of  Men,  1896. 

HOWEVER  his  method  may  differ  from  theirs, 
Winston  Churchill  has  one  thing  in  common  with 
Mark  Twain,  Frank  Norris,  David  Graham  Phillips 
and  Stewart  Edward  White:  he  hates  a  sham  and  a 
fraud  with  the  same  uncompromising  sincerity  that 
they  do.  There  are  signs  of  this  in  Richard  Car 
vel  and  in  his  later  books.  In  The  Celebrity,  pub 
lished  in  1905  —  which  he  is  said  to  have  achieved 
shut  up  in  a  hotel  room  in  the  course  of  hours  rather 

than  of  days  —  the  fact  is  self-evident. 

299 


300     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

It  is  equally  self-evident  that  the  Celebrity  in 
question,  one  Charles  Wrexel  Adams,  represented  a 
contemporary  literary  malefactor  of  great  circula 
tion,  who  wrote  novels  raved  over  by  the  young 
women  of  America  from  Maine  to  California;  whose 
affairs  of  the  heart  were  almost  as  well  known  as 
his  works  of  fiction ;  and  whose  self-conceit  equaled 
his  genius  for  keeping  himself  prominently  in  the 
public  eye. 

The  story  is  told  in  the  first  person  by  a  middle 
Western  lawyer  who  has  known  the  Celebrity  from 
the  time  that  he  wore  kilts,  and  through  a  period  of 
adolescence  when  he  gave  no  evidence  of  his  later 
startling  efflorescence. 

The  portrait  of  the  Celebrity  is  a  triumph  of  art 
and  of  realism.  Crocker,  the  lawyer,  and  his  friend 
Farrar  are  equally,  though  less  obtrusively,  done  to 
the  life.  The  same  may  be  said  of  two  young  women, 
Marion  Thorne  and  Irene  Trevor,  who  form  an  in 
tegral  part  of  the  plot. 

But  the  chief  achievement  in  the  form  of  pure  fic 
tion  that  the  book  presents  is  the  character  of  Far- 
quhar  Fenelon  Cooke,  multi-millionaire  and  turfman, 
formerly  of  Philadelphia,  but  domiciled  during  the 
action  of  the  story  in  Mohair,  a  country  place  laid 
out  and  elaborated  according  to  specifications  emi 
nently  of  his  own  choosing,  in  the  immediate  vicinity 
of  a  conservative  middle  western  resort  of  fashion  on 
the  Great  Lakes. 

Farquhar  Fenelon  Cooke  is  one  of  Nature's  great 
originals,  in  his  own  way  a  celebrity  himself,  and 
equally  with  the  counterfeit  hero  of  the  book,  a  prod 
uct  of  artificial  social  conditions  which  Mr.  Churchill 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  301 

has  seen  fit  to  satirize  inimitably.  At  the  same  time 
the  man  is  real  in  essence,  and  an  effective  foil  to  the 
mass  of  egotism  and  pretense  about  whom  the  action 
of  the  book  is  centered.  Crocker  succeeds  in  win 
ning  an  important  suit  for  Cooke  against  a  Western 
railroad  company,  and  the  latter  is  Crocker's  friend 
for  life.  Farrar,  the  landscape  gardener,  who  has 
laid  out  the  grounds  of  Mohair,  is  almost  equally  in 
the  owner's  good  graces  at  the  time  when  the  Celeb 
rity  appears  on  the  scene. 

u  '  Crocker  '  said  he,  '  it's  the  very  deuce  to  be  fa 
mous,  isn't  it?  ...  I  am  paying  the  penalty  of 
fame.  Wherever  I  go  I  am  hounded  to  death  by  the 
people  who  have  read  my  books,  and  they  want  to 
dine  me  and  wine  me  for  the  sake  of  showing  me  off 
at  their  houses.  I  am  heartily  sick  and  tired  of  it 
all.  ...  It  was  becoming  unbearable.  I  determined 
to  assume  a  name  and  to  go  to  some  quiet  little 
Western  place  for  the  summer.  .  .  .  My  man  boxed 
up,  and  we  were  off  in  twenty-four  hours  and  here  I 
am.  .  .  .  You  won't  tell  anyone  who  I  am,  will  you,' 
he  asked  anxiously. 

"  He  even  misinterpreted  my  silence. 

"  '  Certainly  not,'  I  replied ;  '  it  is  no  concern  of 
mine.  You  might  come  here  as  Emile  Zola  or  Ralph 
Waldo  Emerson,  and  it  would  make  no  difference  to 
me.' 

"  He  looked  at  me  dubiously,  even  suspiciously. 

"  '  That's  a  good  chap,'  said  he  and  was  gone  leav 
ing  me  to  reflect  on  the  ways  of  genius." 

Mr.  Cooke  and  the  Celebrity  join  forces  at  once. 
So  do  the  Celebrity  and  Miss  Trevor,  daughter  of 
one  of  the  more  important  cottagers  at  Asquith,  the 


302  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

resort  in  question.  To  her  the  Celebrity  confides  the 
secret  of  his  real  identity.  There  is  to  be  a  house- 
warming  at  Mohair,  and  the  Celebrity  promises  to 
lead  the  cotillion  with  Irene. 

Marion  Thorne,  Mrs.  Cooke's  niece,  arrives  in  time 
for  the  party.  So  do  ten  of  Mr.  Cooke's  friends  from 
Philadelphia  and  New  York.  Concerning  them  Mr. 
Churchill  has  this  to  say : 

"  I  shall  treat  the  Ten  as  a  whole  because  they 
did  not  materially  differ  from  one  another,  in  dress 
or  habits,  or  ambitions,  or  general  usefulness  on  this 
earth.  .  .  .  Likewise  the  life  of  any  one  of  the  Ten 
was  the  life  of  all,  and  might  be  truthfully  repre 
sented  by  a  single  year,  since  each  year  was  exactly 
like  the  preceding.  The  ordinary  year,  as  is  well 
known,  begins  on  the  first  of  January.  .  .  .  Theirs 
began  in  the  Fall  with  the  New  York  Horse  Show. 
And  I  am  of  the  opinion,  though  open  to  correction, 
that  they  dated  from  the  first  Horse  Show  instead 
of  from  the  birth  of  Christ.  It  is  certain  that  they 
were  much  better  versed  in  the  history  of  the  Asso 
ciation  than  in  that  of  the  Union,  in  the  biography 
of  Excelsior  rather  than  that  of  Lincoln.  The  Dog 
Show  was  another  event  to  which  they  looked  for 
ward,  when  they  emigrated  from  New  York  and  put 
up  at  the  country  places  of  their  friends.  But  why 
go  farther?  " 

We  would  like  to  hear  more  of  the  Ten,  but  unfor 
tunately  they  fall  into  general  disfavor  after  they 
and  their  host  have  succeeded  in  getting  themselves 
and  certain  of  the  quieter  cottagers  hilariously  drunk, 
on  the  night  of  the  dance;  and  six  of  them  return 
in  haste  to  the  place  whence  they  came.  The 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  303 

luster  of  the  Four  that  remain  is  considerably  dulled, 
but  the  Celebrity  is  left  to  supply  all  deficiencies, 
and  for  a  time  he  succeeds  spectacularly. 

Before  Miss  Thome's  arrival,  he  also  succeeds  in 
getting  himself  engaged  to  Miss  Trevor,  and  in  in 
ducing  her  to  keep  the  engagement,  like  his  identity, 
a  secret.  Under  cover  of  this,  he  proceeds  to  make 
just  as  violent  love  to  Miss  Thorne,  whom  he  has 
met  before,  as  Miss  Thorne  will  permit. 

The  moral  of  the  Celebrity's  latest  book  is  that 
inconstancy  in  woman  is  sometimes  pardonable  be 
cause  of  present  social  conditions.  In  man  there 
is  nothing  more  despicable.  This  the  Celebrity  is 
made  to  quote  before  an  admiring  group  of  girls. 

Before  long  the  two  heroines  manage  to  get  to 
gether  and  to  understand  one  another  thoroughly. 
In  the  meantime,  Farquhar  Fenelon  Cooke  installs 
a.  party  of  his  friends  on  his  yacht  for  a  short  cruise. 
The  Captain  deserts  at  the  last  moment,  and  the 
Celebrity  volunteers  to  take  his  place  as  sailing  mas 
ter.  When  a  squall  comes  up,  he  is  displaced  by 
Farrar  and  is  violently  seasick.  They  reach  a  small 
island,  and  here  Crocker  discovers  from  a  newspaper 
sent  on  board  that  the  real  Charles  Wrexel  Adams 
has  recently  absconded  with  a  large  sum  of  money. 
His  description  is  given,  and  it  fits  the  Celebrity  to  a 
hair's  breadth. 

Farquhar  Fenelon  Cooke  is  all  for  getting  his 
guest  away  safely  to  Canada.  There  is  a  judge  on 
board  who  takes  a  diametrically  opposite  view.  A 
man  who  is  believed  to  be  a  detective  appears,  and 
the  Celebrity  passes  the  night  in  an  exceedingly 
damp  and  uncomfortable  cave.  Later  there  is  a 


304     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

visit  by  the  police,  and  he  lies  concealed  in  the  hold 
of  the  yacht  while  search  is  made  for  him. 

The  final  elucidation  of  the  plot  may  safely  be 
left  to  the  reader's  imagination.  At  times  it  bor 
ders  on  hilarious  farce  fit  for  gods  and  men.  At 
times  it  rises  to  something  more  significant;  and  the 
series  of  remarkably  clever  character  drawings  is 
continued  successfully  to  the  end  of  the  book. 

All  of  which  goes  to  prove  that  Mr.  Churchill  has 
a  sense  of  humor  of  his  own,  and  occasionally  shows 
himself  remarkably  fit  to  handle  it.  Humor,  in  the 
ills  of  the  body  politic,  is  only  the  point  of  the  sur 
geon's  probe.  One  may  poke  a  bubble  with  it  in 
passing,  when  not  better  engaged,  where  bubbles  help 
to  obscure  the  real  issues  at  stake  and  to  advertise 
themselves  inordinately  to  people  who  choose  to  see 
life  as  children  do.  Left  to  themselves,  bubbles  col 
lapse  quickly  of  their  own  infinitesimal  weight. 

The  temporary  vogue  of  the  creator  of  Van  Bibber, 
The  King's  Jackal  and  Soldiers  of  Fortune  has  passed 
as  quickly  as  that  of  the  Gibson  girls  who  read  and 
thrilled  over  the  books  and  who  figured  in  their  pages. 

There  are  those  who  will  accuse  Mr.  Davis  of  a 
certain  pathetic  Mid- Victorian  quality  of  self-delu 
sion  in  the  most  ambitious  parts  of  his  literary  out 
put. 

There  are  also  those  who  strongly  suspect  Mr. 
Churchill  of  the  Mid-Victorian  temperament.  Dr. 
F.  T.  Cooper  suggests  as  much  in  an  article  in  The 
Bookman  for  May,  1910,  since  published  in  book- 
form.  Of  Mr.  Churchill's  books  he  says :  "  They  as 
pire  to  be  Literature  spelled  with  a  capital  L;  they 
are  carefully  fashioned  upon  the  great  Mid- Victorian 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  305 

models ;  one  almost  questions  whether  the  author  did 
not  deliberately  draw  his  dividing  line  at  Thackeray 
and  refuse  to  regard  any  subsequent  developments 
of  technique  in  fiction  as  deserving  of  notice." 

Judging  from  the  generally  superficial  and  cur 
sory  manner  in  which  Winston  Churchill  and  his 
books  are  handled  by  Dr.  Cooper  in  this  article  of 
some  four  thousand  words,  his  criticism  is  about  as 
sound  as  a  suggestion  that  Winslow  Homer  and 
Augustus  Saint  Gaudens  are  characteristically  and 
hopelessly  Mid-Victorian  because  they  have  taken 
their  own  lines  and  held  to  them,  and  have  not  felt 
constrained  by  recent  artistic  developments  of  tech 
nique  to  duplicate  in  their  work  the  last  cry  in 
modern  impressionism,  the  ballet  girls  of  Degas,  the 
color  rhapsodies  of  Monet,  the  wildest  vagaries  of 
Whistler,  or  the  senile  sculptural  abortions  of  the 
last  and  worst  period  of  Rodin  and  his  most  parti 
san  admirers  and  imitators. 

In  the  mouths  of  many,  the  term  Mid- Victorian, 
like  the  word  bourgeois,  is  anathema.  In  the  mouths 
of  more,  at  its  best,  it  is  a  badge  of  honor.  In  this 
sense  it  may  be  defined  as  elemental,  strong,  sincere, 
sure  of  itself,  with  the  stability  of  big  foundations, 
concerned  more  with  the  main  issues  of  life  than  with 
any  purely  academic  or  wildly  impressionistic  ex 
ploitation  of  individual  or  esoteric  points  of  view. 

In  this  sense  Winston  Churchill  is  Mid- Victorian ; 
he  is  frankly  and  uncompromisingly  bourgeois.  Mr. 
Henry  D.  Sedgwick  has  instanced  him,  in  several 
quotations  from  The  Crisis,  1904,  as  an  exponent 
of  the  mob  spirit  in  American  literature. 

Dr.  Cooper  admits :     "  There  can  be  no  question 


306     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

that  he  has  succeeded  admirably  in  handling  big 
backgrounds  .  .  .  making  us  feel  the  relative  value 
of  our  own  modest  holding  .  .  .  our  individual  in 
terest,  our  brief  hour,  as  contracted  with  mankind 
and  with  eternity.  It  makes  small  difference 
whether  he  is  describing  a  drunken  broil  in  a  Colonial 
tavern,  an  Indian  massacre  in  Kentucky,  or  a  politi 
cal  riot  in  a  New  England  State  Legislature  —  in 
either  case  his  trick  of  characterization  is  as  graphic 
and  almost  as  indefatigable  as  that  of  the  camera  lens. 
You  see  face  after  face,  figure  behind  figure,  each 
drawn  with  fewer  and  swifter  strokes  as  they  become 
more  blurred  by  distance,  yet  every  one  individual 
ized  and  recognizable.  And  back  of  these  you  still 
feel  the  presence  of  a  crowd,  shoulder  jostling  shoul 
der,  tongue  answering  tongue  full  of  the  rough  viril 
ity  of  conflict," 

On  the  other  hand,  Dr.  Cooper  asserts  that,  "  in 
taking  up  the  separate  volumes,  they  give  the  impres 
sion  of  wandering  aimlessly  along  the  highways  and 
byways  of  life,  with  no  clear  structural  reason  for 
turning  to  the  right  rather  than  the  left,  no  precon 
ceived  goal  toward  which  the  various  tangled  threads 
of  the  story  are  converging." 

The  critic  concedes,  however :  "  And  yet  any  fair 
estimate  of  Mr.  Churchill  must  necessarily  recognize 
that  his  favorite  formula  narrowly  misses  that  of 
the  epic  novel.  He  uses,  as  we  have  already  seen,  a 
double  theme;  first  the  big,  basic  idea  underlying 
some  national  or  ethical  crisis;  and,  secondly1,  a 
specific  human  story  standing  out  vividly  in  the  cen 
tral  focus  with  the  larger,  wider  theme  serving  as 
background.  Where  his  stories  fail  to  achieve  the 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  307 

epic  magnitude  is  in  lacking  that  essential  symbolic 
relationship  between  the  greater  and  the  lesser 
theme." 

This  conclusion  of  Dr.  Cooper's  is,  to  say  the 
least,  questionable.  Passing  by  his  ex  cathedra 
definition  of  the  epic  novel  and  the  precise  moment 
of  geometrically  exact  symbolism  necessary  in  any 
modern  work  of  broad-gauged  historical  fiction  to 
favorably  impress  readers  of  Mr.  Cooper's  own  lim 
ited  intellectual  capacity  and  ingrowing  aesthetic 
sense,  it  is  apparent  in  the  whole  character  and  pur 
port  of  this  critic's  criticism  that  he  quarrels  with 
Mr.  Churchill  because  the  latter  fails  to  write  fiction 
as  a  limited  class  of  critics  and  readers  would  have 
it  written,  preferring  (as  Mr.  Churchill  does)  to  in 
terpret  life  as  it  is  seen  and  felt  by  the  majority 
of  plain  people  and  representative  American  intel 
lects  of  every  social  and  financial  class  for  whom  he 
has  always  consistently  written,  and  will  continue 
to  write. 

This  we  have  in  his  own  words  in  the  mouth  of 
Abraham  Lincoln  in  the  last  few  pages  of  The 
Crisis:  "  '  I  say  to  you,  Brice,'  he  went  on  ear 
nestly,  '  the  importance  of  plain  talk  can't  be  over 
estimated.  Any  thought,  however  abstruse,  can  be 
put  in  speech  that  a  boy  or  a  negro  can  grasp. 
Any  book,  however  deep,  can  be  written  in  terms  that 
everybody  can  comprehend;  if  a  man  only  tries  hard 
enough.  When  I  was  a  boy  I  used  to  hear  the  neigh 
bors  talking,  and  it  bothered  me  so  because  I  could 
not  understand  them  that  I  used  to  sit  up  half  the 
night  thinking  out  things  for  myself.  I  remember 
that  I  did  not  know  what  the  word  demonstrate 


308     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

I 
meant.     So    I   stopped   my   studies   then   and   there 

and  got  a  volume  of  Euclid.  Before  I  got  through 
I  could  demonstrate  everything  in  it,  and  I  have 
never  been  bothered  with  demonstrate  since.'  " 

There  is  small  evidence  that  Mr.  Cooper  has  sat 
up  half  the  night,  or  anything  like  it,  trying  to  get 
at  the  vital  significance  of  The  Crisis,  which  he  dis 
misses  thus  briefly :  "  Passing  over  The  Crisis,  that 
story  of  the  Civil  War  which  is  at  best  a  less  vigorous 
repetition  of  the  qualities  and  the  shortcomings  of 
the  Richard  Carvel,  1899,  we  come  to  Coniston." 

There  is  small  evidence  that  Dr.  Cooper  has  studied 
Richard  Carvel  any  more  accurately.  Here  is  his 
complete  account  of  it :  "  To  begin  with,  Rich 
ard  Carvel  concerns  itself  with  the  life  history  of 
an  orphan  boy  in  the  province  of  Maryland  reared 
by  his  stern  old  grandfather  in  strict  Tory  princi 
ples,  but,  little  by  little,  imbibing  Revolutionary  doc 
trines  from  associates  of  his  own  generation.  An 
unscrupulous  uncle,  scheming  for  the  family  inher 
itance,  has  young  Carvel  waylaid,  kidnapped  and 
flung  aboard  a  private  craft  to  be  later  dropped 
over  the  rail  at  a  convenient  time.  The  pirate  boat, 
however,  is  scuttled  by  the  famous  naval  hero,  John 
Paul  Jones,  and  Carvel  is  the  sole  survivor.  Sub 
sequently,  fate  lands  him  in  London,  penniless  and 
without  friends,  where  he  spends  some  weary  months 
in  the  debtor's  prison,  knowing  all  the  while  that  the 
girl  whom  he  loved  back  in  America  is  also  in  Lon 
don,  courted  by  dukes  and  earls,  and  that  his  present 
predicament  is  known  quite  well  by  the  girl's  father, 
who  is  only  too  glad  to  have  a  persistent  suitor  out 
of  harm's  way. 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  309 

"  The  rest  of  the  story  consists  of  some  swift 
changes  of  fortune,  some  well-drawn  pictures  of 
fashionable  English  life  in  which  Horace  Walpole, 
Charles  James  Fox  and  other  historic  personages 
take  part ;  a  few  stirring  naval  battles  and  finally 
peace  between  the  twro  countries  and  Carvel  happily 
married  and  settled  on  his  ancestral  acres.  It  is  to 
be  noticed  that  this  plot  is  merely  a  string  of  epi 
sodes  governed  for  the  most  part  by  the  intervention 
of  chance.  It  is  little  more  than  a  highly  developed 
picaresco  type  with  rather  less  cohesion  than  the 
average  Dumas  romance.  Whatever  literary  qual 
ity  it  possesses  is  due  not  to  plot  but  to  individual 
portraiture  and  a  pervading  sense  of  atmosphere." 

Much  the  same  criticism  may  be  made  of  Don 
Quixote,  Tom  Jones,  Henry  Esmond,  The  Cloister 
and  the  Hearth,  Lorna  Doone,  Tom  Sawyer  and  Tlie 
Virginians,  to  go  no  farther  —  with  many  of  which  in 
the  last  analysis  Richard  Carvel  may  fairly  be  ranked. 
It  is  quite  true  that  in  this  book  Winston  Churchill 
frankly  imitates  Thackeray,  notably  the  latter's 
Henri/  Esmond.  It  is  equally  true  that  in  this  book 
Churchill,  more  than  Thackeray  did  in  Esmond,  more 
than  Cervantes  did  in  Don  Quixote,  more  than  Black- 
more  did  in  Lorna  Doone,  more  than  Fielding  did  in 
Tom  Jones,  fixes  the  soul  of  an  epoch  and  a  peo 
ple.  In  this  one  detail  and  phase  that  permeates 
it,  it  remains  an  imperishable  part  of  our  Anglo- 
Saxon  heritage  of  literature  and  life.  It  has  much 
of  the  atmosphere,  the  grace,  the  tenderness,  the 
dignity  and  intimate  personal  charm  of  Esmond,  but 
at  the  same  time  it  digs  deeper,  it  represents  more, 
it  is  more  American. 


310     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

It  is  not,  as  Dr.  Cooper  asserts,  a  mere  string  of 
episodes  governed  by  chance,  and  a  picaresque  ac 
count  of  an  orphan  boy's  wanderings  and  rise  to  for 
tune. 

For  one  thing,  it  is  a  story  of  the  genesis  of  the 
American  Navy.  It  contains  one  of  the  most  thrill 
ing  accounts  in  all  fiction  of  a  sea  fight  second  to 
none  in  all  history  for  heroism  on  both  sides.  Be 
cause  of  the  unique  atmospheric  charm  that  Mr. 
Cooper  himself  cannot  wholly  disregard,  it  cannot 
be  quoted  with  justice  in  sections,  but  the  account 
of  the  fight  between  the  Bonhomme  Richard  and 
the  Serapis,  with  the  immortal  "  I  have  not  yet  be 
gun  to  fight  "  of  John  Paul  Jones  as  the  keynote, 
should  alone  go  far  to  make  the  book  a  new  Amer 
ican  classic  of  a  very  high  order  and  a  permanent 
national  asset  and  inspiration. 

The  book  has  other  qualities  of  permanence,  merely 
as  literature.  The  characters  of  John  Paul,  of 
Charles  Fox,  of  Horace  Walpole,  of  Lord  Comyn, 
of  Lord  Chartersea,  of  Grafton  Carvel  and  his 
father,  of  Patty  Swain  and  hers,  of  Dorothy  Man 
ners  and  hers,  of  the  rector  of  St.  Mary's,  and  of 
Richard  himself,  stand  out  clearly  and  convincingly 
as  indicative  of  their  era  on  both  sides  of  the  At 
lantic.  The  action  at  the  start  is  not  laid  by  chance, 
without  intention,  in  Maryland,  the  most  patrician 
of  the  thirteen  colonies.  The  lawyer  from  the  North 
does  not  come  there  by  any  freak  of  fortune. 

He  sees  a  business  opening  there,  takes  advan 
tage  of  the  opportunity  and  makes  good  there.  He 
rises  by  sheer  force  of  hard  work,  of  shrewd  sense 
and  square  dealing,  to  ultimate  social  recognition 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  311 

for  himself  and  his  family,  and  to  an  intimate  place 
in  the  revolutionary  counsels  and  on  the  executive 
committee  of  the  leading  men  of  the  province.  Rich 
ard  himself,  though  of  patrician  blood  to  begin  with, 
evolves  into  one  of  the  most  democratic  as  well  as 
one  of  the  most  human  of  heroes.  Thackeray  him 
self  has  said  that  he  considered  Henry  Esmond  a 
bit  of  a  prig;  no  one  can  consistently  accuse  Richard 
Carvel  of  as  much  or  as  little. 

Richard  proves  his  fitness  for  democracy  equally 
in  his  friendships  with  John  Paul  and  Lord  Comyn ; 
in  the  friends  and  the  enemies  that  he  makes,  and  in 
his  manner  of  dealing  with  both  throughout  the  book. 
He  is  not  naturally  brilliant,  but  nevertheless  he  is 
nobody's  fool.  He  fits  naturally,  and  with  success 
up  to  a  certain  point,  into  the  brilliantly  vicious  life 
of  court  circles  in  London,  because  he  is  to  the  man 
ner  born  —  young,  handsome,  generous,  discreet ;  an 
excellent  horseman,  swordsman,  sportsman ;  possessed 
of  a  steady  head  and  an  iron  nerve  where  drinking 
and  gambling  are  two  of  the  main  issues  of  life.  He 
is  boy  enough  to  enjoy  this  sort  of  a  thing  for  a 
time,  human  enough  to  go  the  pace  successfully  with 
Fox  and  his  associates,  and  to  have  the  time  of  his  life 
while  he  is  doing  it. 

He  is  man  enough  to  stand  up  for  his  rights,  to 
become  the  spokesman  of  America  to  Fox  and  his 
crowd,  to  win  respect  from  them,  where,  respect  is 
an  unknown  quality ;  man  enough,  when  he  is  wrong 
fully  cheated  out  of  his  inheritance  by  his  uncle,  to 
go  home  to  Maryland  and  to  make  a  career  for  him 
self  by  hard  work  and  native  shrewdness,  on  his  na 
tive  soil,  as  the  majority  of  his  ancestors  and  com- 


312     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

patriots  have  done  before  or  since  in  the  land  of 
their  birth  or  adoption. 

He  shows  himself,  among  other  things,  an  excel 
lent  man  of  business  and  affairs,  as  well  as  an  in 
spired  and  inspiring  patriot  and  lover. 

The  book  is  broadly  and  intensely  democratic  in 
far  more  than  the  delineation  of  its  central  char 
acter  and  the  minor  characterizations  of  John 
Paul,  Lawyer  Swain  and  other  lesser  figures  and 
personages.  It  is  characteristically  American  in  the 
best  sense :  in  its  hatred  of  snobbery,  pretense,  treach 
ery  and  injustice.  It  preaches  at  the  same  time  by 
indirection  and  very  much  to  the  point.  It  is  true 
to  life.  It  transcends  the  ordinary  historical  ro 
mance  of  considerable  literary  pretensions  in  that  it 
makes  its  major  and  minor  villains,  Chartersea,  and 
his  fellow-duelist,  Grafton  Carvel,  Richard's  old 
rector  and  tutor,  and  Dorothy  Manners's  father, 
more  the  products  of  untoward  environment  than  of 
the  evil  in  their  own  natures. 

Similarly  the  more  reputable  part  of  its  popula 
tion  are  people  that  most  of  us  would  be  proud  to 
know  and  to  have  for  friends.  They  are  what  they 
are  not  so  much  in  virtue  of  any  inherent  graces  of 
blood  and  breeding,  though  these  things  too  are 
added  to  some  of  the  most  prominent  of  them,  as  be 
cause  circumstances  in  the  hands  of  the  author  con 
spire  to  bring  out  strongly  the  best  that  is  in  them. 

In  Richard's  case  this  has  been  sufficiently  dwelt 
upon.  In  that  of  Dorothy  Manners,  who  is  charac 
teristically  an  American  girl  of  yesterday,  to-day 
and  to-morrow  —  in  her  parent's  desire  to  make  a 
brilliant  international  marriage  for  her,  and  in  her 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  313 

own  careless  acceptance  of  the  situation  —  it  takes 
time  and  an  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  seamy 
side  of  aristocratic  life  abroad  to  effect  the  beginnings 
of  her  cure. 

After  Richard  has  gone  back  to  America  impover 
ished,  and  unwilling  to  ask  her  to  marry  him  so  while 
his  memory  persists  in  sharp  contrast  to  the  life 
around  her;  after  his  own  father  has  shown  her  the 
depths  of  dishonor  and  treachery  to  which  snobbery 
and  the  love  of  money  can  and  will  pledge  itself ;  after 
he  has  impoverished  himself  and  his  wife  and  daugh 
ter;  after  she  and  her  mother  have  learned  to  sup 
port  themselves  and  him  by  the  work  of  their  own 
hands ;  after  she  has  experienced  a  veritable  and 
lasting  change  of  heart,  Richard  comes  back  to  her 
wounded  and  like  to  die  as  a  result  of  the  fight  with 
the  Serapis,  and  she  rises  to  the  situation  as  the 
women  of  her  race  have  always  risen,  and  still  at 
times  show  the  capacity  to  rise. 

The  book  ends  happily  in  the  manner  of  the  older 
novelists,  with  their  marriage  and  the  birth  of  their 
children  and  grandchildren.  At  the  same  time  we 
are  made  to  feel,  as  no  mere  romance  can  make  us  do, 
that  they  have  earned  their  happiness  —  not  as  the 
spoiled  favorites  of  fortune,  nor  through  the  interpo 
sition  of  some  S3rmbolically  conceived  and  divinely  ap 
pointed  plot  of  destiny ;  but  that  they  have  made  it 
out  of  the  common  everyday  working  material  and 
stuff  of  life  and  of  character,  in  the  only  way  that 
is  natural  and  inevitable  to  the  great  mass  of  suc 
cessful  men  and  women  of  all  sorts  and  conditions, 
ranks  and  classes  of  civilization. 

Dr.  Cooper  himself  partially  admits  as  much  when 


314     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

he  says  Winston  Churchill's  novels  possess  "  one  ele 
ment  which  every  reader  of  them  must  feel  to  a 
marked  degree :  namely,  that  sense  of  the  unexpected 
and  inexplicable;  that  infinitude  of  daily  happenings 
of  accidents  and  coincidences,  the  meaning  of  which 
in  the  ultimate  pattern  of  life  must  always  baffle 
us." 

The  meaning  of  American  history,  of  its  share  in 
the  making  and  in  the  interpretation  of  civilization 
and  of  evolution  at  large,  will  continue  to  baffle  peo 
ple  like  Mr.  Cooper  for  some  considerable  time  to 
come,  so  long  as  they  continue  to  apply  the  minor 
canons  of  fiction  for  fiction's  sake  to  books  like 
The  Crossing,  The  Crisis,  Coniston  and  Mr.  Crewe's 
Career.  It  is  true  that  the  former  two  fall 
considerably  below  the  level  of  Richard  Carvel  and 
the  rest  as  consistent  works  of  art  and  fiction. 
It  is  true  that  all  four  of  them  have  the  defects 
of  their  qualities,  structural  and  technical,  in  detail 
and  in  finish,  all  the  more  noticeable  —  like  the  ugli 
ness  of  Lincoln  and  the  military  bluntness  of  Grant 
—  because  they  embody  the  national  directness  and 
concentration  of  aim  along  the  lines  of  least  resistance 
leading  to  one  definite  goal  so  eminently  characteris 
tic  of  the  generations  that  have  passed  and  are  pass 
ing. 

These  books  were  born  of  the  people,  by  the  people, 
for  the  people.  They  set  forth  unmistakably  the  au 
thor's  convictions  of  the  way  our  theory  of  the  great 
est  good  for  the  greatest  number,  guaranteed  by  law 
and  frequently  disregarded  in  practice,  has  worked 
and  is  still  working  itself  out  during  the  course  of  the 
past  century  and  the  present  one. 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  315 

Taken  singly  and  collectively,  they  are  optimistic 
in  tone  with  the  hard-won  optimism  that  has  to  fight 
hard  for  what  it  holds  fast. 

One  by  one,  or  all  together,  they  are  big  and  vital 
enough  to  be  judged  first  and  last  not  as  mere  works 
of  fiction  and  more  or  less  successful  products  of  lit 
erary  art  and  artisanship,  but  as  human  documents 
and  national  studies  in  men  and  events  of  a  very  per 
manent  and  distinctive  value. 

Consequently,  when  Dr.  Cooper  tells  us  that  "  the 
specific  story  of  David  Ritchie  in  The  Crossing 
has  even  less  cohesion  than  that  of  Richard  Car 
vel.  Throughout  the  greater  part  of  it  Ritchie  is  a 
mere  lad,  and  as  drummer  boy  accompanies  the  expe 
dition  of  George  Rogers  Clark  from  Kentucky  north 
ward  to  the  Wabash  River  and  Vincennes.  It  is  a 
chronicle  of  border  warfare,  of  Indian  treachery  and 
of  ghastly  massacres.  It  is  scarcely  fiction  in  the 
strict  sense  of  the  term.  .  .  .  Now  it  is  the  lot  of  a 
good  many  human  beings,  both  in  childhood  and  in 
later  years,  to  drift  along  the  stream  of  life  .  .  . 
and  it  often  happens  that  somewhere  or  other  in  the 
course  of  such  drifting  they  meet  a  woman  whom 
they  wish  to  marry.  It  does  not,  however,  usually 
occur  to  a  novelist  that  this  is  the  stuff  that  books  are 
made  of  ...  the  trouble  with  The  Crossing  is  not 
that  it  lacks  completeness,  but  that  it  fails  to  be  a 
novel  " —  we  find  his  conclusion  to  some  extent  in 
conclusive. 

If  The  Crossing  does  so  fail  in  Dr.  Cooper's  es 
timation  of  novels  that  are  novels,  it  stands  in  good 
company  with  The  Pathfinder,  The  Last  of  the  Mo 
hicans,  The  Prairie,  The  Virginian,  Sienkiewizs'  Fire 


316     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  Sword,  The  Deluge  and  Pan  Michael,  Gogol's 
Taras  Bulba,  Tolstoy's  War  and  Peace,  and  most  of 
the  big  epic  stories  or  panoramas  of  military  and 
frontier  life  that  have  set  forth  successfully  a  na 
tional  movement  or  the  life  of  a  period  too  big  and 
too  free  to  be  caged  within  the  nicely  filed  and  fin 
ished  proportions  of  a  conventional  plot  in  the  hands 
of  a  conventional  craftsman. 

More  than  this,  The  Crossing,  though  capable 
of  improvement  and  far  from  measuring  up  in  all 
details  to  the  movement  that  it  seeks  to  chronicle,  is, 
in  an  essential  sense  and  in  its  very  fluidity  of  plot  and 
treatment,  far  more  true  to  the  life  of  the  period  and 
to  the  individual  lives  of  America's  foremost  scouts 
and  tippers,  prospectors,  traders,  pioneers,  back 
woods  men  and  leaders  known  and  unknown  to  his 
tory,  than  the  conventional,  academic,  nicely  modeled, 
perfectly  balanced,  artistically  composed  and  con 
structed,  denaturalized  and  devitalized  product  of 
literary  tradition  that  Mr.  Cooper  would  choose  to 
make  of  it. 

It  has  one  or  two  primary  virtues  characteristic  of 
the  people  it  deals  with.  It  is  true  to  the  conditions 
it  sets  forth.  It  is  strong,  simple  and  sincere.  It  is 
eminently  readable  and  intensely  interesting  as  the 
life  that  its  hero  lived  was  interesting.  With  greater 
artistry,  it  might  have  been  made  so  to  the  more  so 
phisticated. 

Such  as  it  is,  it  is  a  characteristic  product  of  en 
vironment.  Such  as  it  is,  it  sets  forth  adequately, 
for  the  plain  people  of  America,  the  story  of  the  im 
pulse  westward  of  their  own  ancestors  and  the  imi 
tation  of  a  world  movement  which  is  even  now  carry- 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  317 

ing  the  course  of  empire  still  farther  westward  to 
Alaska  and  the  Philippines. 

Continuity  of  plot  it  may  lack  in  some  degree ;  the 
continuity  of  the  national  impulse  and  the  race  pres 
sure  that  is  making  America  it  sets  forth  admira 
bly.  Equally  admirable  are  its  characterizations ; 
and  to  the  gallery  of  national  portraits  begun  by 
Mr.  Churchill  with  Washington  and  John  Paul  Jones 
in  Richard  Carvel,  it  adds  imperishably  Davy  Crock 
ett,  Daniel  Boone,  George  Rogers  Clark  and  the  rest 
of  the  pioneers  of  that  period. 

In  The  Crisis,  which  centers  in  St.  Louis,  his  own 
birthplace  and  former  residence,  Mr.  Churchill  has 
added  Lincoln,  Grant  and  Sherman  to  the  list.  Here 
we  find  the  focus  of  two  distinctive  national  and  racial 
types. 

"  Two  centuries  before,  when  Charles  Stuart 
walked  out  of  a  window  in  Whitehall  Palace  to  die; 
when  the  great  English  race  was  in  the  throes  of  a 
Civil  War;  when  the  Stern  and  the  Gay  slew  each 
other  at  Naseby  and  Marston  Moor,  two  currents 
flowed  across  the  Atlantic  to  the  New  World.  Then 
the  Stern  men  found  the  stern  climate  and  the  Gay 
found  the  smiling  climate.  .  .  .  After  cycles  of  sep 
aration,  Puritan  and  Cavalier  united  on  this  clay- 
bank  in  the  Louisiana  Purchase,  and  swept  westward 
together.  Like  the  struggle  of  two  great  rivers 
when  they  meet,  the  waters  for  a  while  were  dan 
gerous." 

The  South  is  typified  by  Virginia  Carvel,  grand 
daughter  of  Richard,  her  father  a  typical  southern 
colonel  of  the  old  school,  and  Clarence  Colfax,  her 
cousin  and  lover;  the  North,  by  Stephen  Brice,  who 


318     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

comes  to  St.  Louis  from  Boston  to  study  law  with  a 
friend  of  his  father's;  by  his  mother  and  by  other 
men  and  women  of  his  breed,  together  with  Carl 
Richter  and  his  friends,  who  represent  the  great  Ger 
man  emigration  to  America  after  the  failure  of  the 
German  Revolution  of  1848.  Brice  arrives  in  time 
to  be  sent  by  Judge  Whipple  to  hear  Lincoln's  Free- 
port  debate  with  Douglas  in  August,  1858. 

The  chapter  named  "  The  Crisis  "  occurs  early  in 
the  book.  Here  Lincoln  puts  a  question  on  the  Free- 
port  platform :  "  Can  the  people  of  a  United  States 
Territory,  in  any  lawful  way,  against  the  wish  of  any 
citizen  of  the  United  States,  exclude  slavery  from  its 
limits  prior  to  the  formation  of  a  State  Constitu 
tion?  " 

This  question  Douglas,  the  great  compromiser  of 
his  period,  can  neither  answer  nor  evade.  Lincoln 
goes  his  way,  saying  that  the  United  States  cannot 
continue  to  exist  half  slave  and  half  free;  and  the 
soul  of  patrician  and  exclusive  Boston  in  Stephen 
Brice  has  a  new  birth. 

Before  this  he  has  distinguished  himself,  at  the  mo 
ment  of  his  arrival  in  St.  Louis,  by  buying  at  public 
auction,  with  all  the  money  that  he  has  in  the  world,  a 
quadroon  girl  who  is  in  danger  of  being  sold  down 
river  —  after  he  has  heard  Virginia  say  that  she 
wants  the  girl  for  a  household  servant. 

It  takes  Virginia,  and  Colfax  who  is  doing  the  bid 
ding  for  her,  a  long  time  to  get  over  this.  It  takes 
Brice  a  long  time  to  make  a  success  of  the  law,  but 
by  the  time  the  war  is  at  hand,  he  is  recognized  as 
a  man  of  strength  and  standing  in  the  community ; 
and  neither  Virginia  nor  Colfax  himself  fail  to  give 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  319 

him  in  the  end  the  half  reluctant  admiration  and  loy 
alty  that  his  nature  demands. 

Stephen  Brice  is  not  a  prig  and  an  impossible  hero, 
though  he  does  go  to  war  as  a  mere  lieutenant,  when 
he  might  have  gone  as  a  lieutenant  colonel.  Lincoln 
and  the  men  like  Lincoln  whom  he  knows  save  him 
from  that.  He  is  typical  of  the  men  of  the  time  who 
rose  to  meet  the  Crisis,  who  saw  the  issues  involved 
clearly,  who  hewed  to  the  line  and  refused  to  shrink 
from  the  logical  results  of  their  own  deeds  and  those 
of  others.  Among  these  men  is  Judge  Whipple,  who 
through  sheer  force  of  character  remains  friends  with 
Comyn  Carvel  and  his  daughter  to  the  last.  The 
Judge  is  a  radical  and  an  Abolitionist.  He  never 
pretends  that  he  is  not.  In  the  minds  of  many  to 
day  he  would  be  classed  as  a  dangerous  fanatic. 

"  The  conservative  classes !  I  am  tired  of  hear 
ing  about  the  conservative  classes.  Why  not  come 
out  with  it,  sir,  and  say  the  moneyed  classes,  who 
would  rather  see  souls  held  in  bondage  than  risk 
their  worldly  goods  in  an  attempt  to  liberate  them?  " 

Which  prompts  the  further  question  whether  the 
United  States  of  America  can  any  more  continue 
half  slave  and  half  free  in  the  twentieth  century 
than  it  could  in  Lincoln's  day. 

Mr.  Churchill  evidently  meant  this  question  to  be 
asked.  There  is  no  doubt  in  his  mind  whatever  as 
to  how  Lincoln  and  the  Judge  would  answer  it,  if 
they  could  speak  to  us  in  the  flesh  to-day.  As  it  is, 
he  makes  them  speak  to  us  in  the  spirit  unmistaka 
bly. 

The  judge  dies  after  the  fall  of  Vicksburg.  Mr. 
Churchill  has  been  sufficiently  old-fashioned  to  in- 


320     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

dulge  in  a  single  death-bed  scene.  It  is  true  that 
this  same  death-bed  scene  is  an  integral  part  of  a 
plot  that  Mr.  Cooper  has  seen  fit  to  pass  over  in  si 
lence;  that  it  brings  Colonel  Carvel  into  the  Union 
lines  in  danger  of  betrayal  and  death  at  the  hands 
of  his  own  head  clerk,  and  that  it  gives  Virginia  an 
opportunity  to  find  out  that  she  is  in  love  with 
Major  Brice  in  spite  of  herself. 

The  Judge  sends  for  Stephen  for  the  last  time 
and  tells  him : 

"  '  You  have  been  faithful  in  a  few  things.  So 
shall  you  be  made  ruler  over  many  things.  The 
little  I  have  I  leave  to  you,  and  the  chief  of  this  is 
an  untarnished  name.  ...  In  the  days  gone  by  our 
fathers  worked  for  the  good  of  the  people  and  they 
had  no  thought  of  gain.  A  time  is  coming  when  we 
shall  need  that  blood  and  that  bone  in  this  Republic. 
Wealth  not  yet  dreamed  of  will  flow  out  of  this  land, 
and  the  waters  of  it  will  rot  all  save  the  pure,  and 
corrupt  all  save  the  incorruptible.  Half-tried  men 
will  go  down  before  that  flood.  You  and  those  like 
you  will  remember  how  the  fathers  governed  — 
strongly,  sternly,  justly.  It  was  so  that  they  gov 
erned  themselves.  Be  vigilant.  Serve  your  city, 
serve  your  state,  but  above  all,  serve  your  country. 
.  .  .  When  I  had  tried  you  I  Vished  your  mind  to 
open,  to  keep  pace  with  the  growth  of  this  nation. 
I  sent  you  to  see  Abraham  Lincoln  —  that  you  might 
be  born  again  —  in  the  West.  You  were  born 
again.  I  saw  it  in  your  face.'  .  .  . 

"  '  O  God,'  he  cried,  with  sudden  eloquence,  '  would 
that  his  hands  —  Abraham  Lincoln's  hands  —  might 
be  laid  upon  all  who  complain  and  cavil  and  criticize, 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  321 

and  think  of  the  little  things  of  life !  Would  that  his 
spirit  might  possess  their  spirit ! ' 

If  this  and  the  final  chapters,  where  Lincoln  and 
Grant  are  seen  at  City  Point  before  the  surrender 
of  Richmond;  where  Lincoln  enters  the  captive  city 
unheralded,  with  a  guard  of  ten  marines  —  not  as  a 
conqueror  but  as  a  peacemaker;  where  in  the  fur 
therance  of  the  same  high  office  he  pardons  Colonel 
Colfax  (as  he  pardoned  hundreds  of  others),  who 
has  been  captured  out  of  uniform  within  the  Union 
lines :  if  all  this,  like  the  rest  of  the  book,  be  liter 
ature  of  the  mob,  it  remains  for  Mr.  Sedgwick,  Dr. 
Cooper  and  their  like,  together  with  several  millions 
more  of  their  fellow-countrymen  whose  views  radi 
cally  diverge  from  theirs,  to  make  the  most  of  it. 

It  may  seem  at  first  reading  that  certain  parts 
of  these  chapters  are  keyed  too  high.  It  may  seem 
on  a  cursory  survey  that  a  certain  manifestation  of 
the  passion  for  freedom  and  the  republic  that  in 
spired  our  own  parents  and  grandparents  fifty  years 
ago  in  the  Middle  West  has  very  little  to  do  with  us 
twentieth  century  Americans  of  Boston  and  New 
York  to-day.  If  this  be  so,  it  is  very  possibly  quite 
as  much  our  fault  as  theirs. 

If  it  be  not  so,  if  we  are  not  in  reality  as  ultra- 
civilized,  as  hypercritical  or  cynical  and  super 
ficially  worldly-wise  as  certain  critics  and  their  fol 
lowers  would  try  to  persuade  us,  then  Mr.  Churchill 
has  done  well  to  wake  us  up  to  the  fact  that  the  spirit 
of  '76  and  of  '61  lives  on  in  this  nation  to-day,  im 
perishable  and  indomitable,  beneath  our  superficial 
faults  and  failures,  as  it  did  in  the  days  of  Richard 
Carvel  and  Stephen  Brice. 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

The  Crisis,  like  all  novels  that  treat  a  great 
theme  greatly,  is  far  from  perfect.  But  its  very 
faults,  its  very  fluidity  and  shapelessness  of  con 
struction  in  a  purely  literary  sense,  help  to  make  it 
more  intimately  representative  of  the  temper  and 
spirit  of  the  times  it  represents  than  any  novel  treat 
ing  of  the  same  period,  however  artistically  planned 
and  elaborated  that  we  have  had  yet,  or  are  likely 
to  have  for  a  long  time  to  come. 

Consciously  or  unconsciously,  Mr.  Churchill  has 
made  of  The  Crisis  a  cross-section  of  the  Amer 
ican  mind  and  heart  of  the  Civil  War  period  on  both 
sides  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.  He  has  thrown 
the  searchlight  of  truth  thrillingly  and  accurately 
on  certain  personages  and  phases  of  the  great  con 
flict.  More  than  that,  he  has  made  the  vast  ma 
jority  of  his  readers  feel  intensely  that  these  person 
ages,  real  and  fictitious,  are  indissolubly  a  part  of 
the  people  of  America.  In  the  light  of  this  he  has 
added  a  notable  achievement  to  the  permanencies  of 
American  literature.  More  or  less  enlightened  crit 
ics  of  the  letter,  not  the  spirit  of  the  law,  to  the  con 
trary  notwithstanding,  the  book  stands  and  will  con 
tinue  to  stand. 

Mr.  Cooper  himself  is  able  to  say  a  good  word  for 
Coniston,  1906.  He  considers  it  a  book  which  de 
serves  rather  careful  consideration,  "  not  merely  be 
cause  it  shows  us  people  no  longer  through  the  veil 
of  romantic  glamour,  but  face  to  face ;  but  more  es 
pecially  because  it  is  the  one  book  he  has  yet  writ 
ten  the  plot  of  which  will  bear  careful  dissection. 
Coniston  may  not  unfairly  be  called  a  prose  epic 
of  political  corruption  as  it  existed  in  New  England 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  323 

a  generation  or  more  ago.  .  .  .  What  is  important 
is  that  we  get  a  sense  of  life  and  of  conflict,  of  im 
pulses  to  do  right,  clashing  with  the  instincts  of  self- 
protection  ;  of  a  grim  political  battle  for  the  politi 
cal  survival  of  the  fittest,  and  the  entire  State,  its 
banks,  its  franchises,  its  governor,  its  legislature, 
all  reposing  in  the  pocket  of  one  man,  the  undis 
puted  party  boss.  This  man,  Jethro  Bass,  simple 
farmer  by  origin,  taciturn,  inscrutable,  with  his 
streak  of  sardonic  humor,  and  his  slight  unforgetta 
ble  stammer,  is  easily  the  most  important  single 
figure  that  Mr.  Churchill  has  drawn.  ...  It  is  not 
too  much  praise  to  say  that  in  the  annals  of  fiction 
a  Jethro  Bass  deserves  to  stand  for  as  definite  a 
figure  as  a  Pecksniff,  a  Micawber,  a  Becky  Sharp." 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  stands  for  more.  He 
stands  definitely  for  a  national  and  a  social  type 
of  power  perverted  to  evil  uses  through  the  influence 
of  a  characteristically  national  environment  that  no 
one  of  the  other  three  characters  instanced  more  than 
remotely  suggested. 

Mr.  Hamilton  W.  Mabie  says  of  this  book  in 
the  North  American  Review  for  September,  1906: 
"  Coniston  was  a  community  of  this  sort.  It  was 
made  up  of  men  and  women  who  were  descended  from 
English-speaking  ancestors.  .  .  .  There  were  great 
hills,  and  there  was  that  reach  of  the  sky  which  no 
New  England  community  ever  lacked;  and  there  was 
an  abundance  of  human  nature.  The  word  '  Ameri 
can  '  means  a  good  deal  more  than  it  did  even  a  gen 
eration  ago.  .  .  .  Coniston  was  a  very  pleasant 
place  because  there  the  word  had  its  old  meaning 
.  when  the  novelist  who  understands  his  busi- 


324     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ness   begins   work   in   one   of   these   communities,  he 
stands  in  small  need  of  foreign  capital. 

("  Mr.  Churchill  always  has  had  a  decided  list  to 
wards  what  may  be  called  '  Americanism,'  ...  he 
has  an  instinctive  feeling  for  the  underlying  and 
definitive  forces  in  this  country ;  and  it  is  no  assump 
tion  to  say  that  he  carries  the  map  of  the  continents 
in  his  imagination  and  memory.  It  is  easy  to  find 
flaws  in  The  Crisis  and  The  Crossing;  they  would 
gain  by  condensation  and  by  greater  sensitiveness 
to  diction;  but  no  one  can  read  them  with  an 
open  mind  and  fail  to  recognize  the  presence  of  the 
historical  imagination  on  an  unusual  scale  and  the 
power  of  treating  incidents  of  national  significance 
in  a  dramatic  way. 

"  In  these  stories  of  national  scope  there  is  in 
places  a  lack  of  sharp  individualization ;  the  stage 
dwarfs  the  actors.  In  Coniston,  on  the  other  hand, 
there  is  close,  detailed  and  exact  definition  of 
personality;  by  localizing  his  story  Mr.  Churchill 
has  gained  in  concentration,  sharpness  of  outline, 
convincing  clearness  of  characterization.  Of  this 
old  time  American  rural  life,  Jethro  Bass,  the  central 
figure  ...  of  Coniston,  is  the  impersonation  .  .  . 
This  self-made  politician  who  has  never  lost  his  guile 
less  innocency  of  manner,  becomes  the  master  of  a 
State  and  deals  on  even  terms  with  the  heads  of 
great  railroad  systems.  .  .  .  His  habit  of  winning 
without  showing  his  cards,  his  original  and  individ 
ual  humor,  and  his  loyalty  to  persons  if  not  to  prin 
ciples,  make  him  a  companion  of  whom  it  is  impossible 
to  approve  but  who  never  for  an  instant  becomes 
uninteresting  or  ceases  to  appeal  to  our  sympathies. 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  325 

"  So  much  human  nature  has  rarely  been  put  into 
one  person  as  Mr.  Churchill  has  put  into  this  old- 
fashioned  country  '  boss,'  and  reformers  will  do  well 
to  study  this  exponent  of  the  Andrew  Jackson  con 
ception  of  politics." 

Coming  back  to  Dr.  Cooper  again,  we  learn  that 
"  Coniston  gives  us  the  entire  childhood  of  its  hero 
ine;  in  fact,  it  goes  further  than  that  and  shows 
us  the  youth,  the  marriage  and  death  of  the  heroine's 
mother.  ...  In  Coniston,  the  focus  of  interest  is 
not  Cynthia  Wetherell,  but  Jethro  Bass;  and  her 
childhood  is  in  quite  a  masterful  manner  a  study  of 
a  man's  slow  transformation  under  the  influence  of 
affection  and  trust.  Jethro  Bass  once  hoped  to 
marry  Cynthia  Wetherell's  mother.  .  .  .  He  chose 
...  to  take  the  first  step  towards  the  conquest  of 
his  own  town,  the  first  step  towards  the  bossism  of 
the  whole  State ;  and  the  girl's  clear,  fearless  eyes 
looking  into  his  read  him  aright  and  knew  that  there 
could  be  no  happiness  for  him  where  there  could  not 
also  be  honor.  Afterwards  when  Jethro  befriends 
the  dead  woman's  orphan  daughter  .  .  .  his  one 
great  wish  is  that  she  may  always  be  spared  the 
knowledge  of  his  knavery,  the  secret  of  his  wealth, 
the  sources  of  his  power.  To  the  reader  all  the  un 
der  currents  of  dishonest  politics  are  exposed  naked 
and  unashamed. 

"  Mr.  Churchill  has  nowhere  else  approached  in 
sheer  narrative  power  the  graphic  vigor  of  the  best 
scenes  of  this  book ;  that  for  instance  of  the  wonder 
ful  '  Woodchuck  Session  '  in  which  the  Truro  fran 
chise  is  jammed  through  the  legislature  by  a  bit  of 
unparalleled  trickery;  and  the  equally  remarkable 


326     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

interview  with  President  Grant,  in  which  Jethro 
saves  the  power  almost  wrested  from  him  by  forcing 
the  appointment  of  his  candidate  for  a  second-class 
post  office.  Scenes  like  these  .  .  .  belong  to  the 
memorable  situations  in  the  annals  of  fiction.  And 
the  climax  to  which  the  story  inevitably  works  up  is 
a  fitting  conclusion  to  an  exceptionally  good  piece 
of  constructive  craftsmanship;  .  .  .  the  life  happi 
ness  of  Cynthia  can  be  purchased  by  Jethro  only  at 
the  price  of  his  political  downfall;  and  the  sacrifice 
he  makes  freely.  .  .  .  To  the  world  at  large  he  is 
defeated  and  dethroned  ...  to  Cynthia  he  is  ... 
a  man  in  whom  her  affection  has  worked  a  great  and 
wonderful  reformation." 

In  the  end,  after  the  obstacle  of  political  war  to 
the  hilt  has  been  removed,  Cynthia  marries  the  son 
of  Jethro's  bitterest  enemy,  who  is  himself  a  male 
factor  of  great  wealth.  Worthington  Junior  is  not 
a  chip  of  the  old  block.  He  and  his  father  differ 
vitally  as  to  individual  and  corporate  rights  and 
wrongs.  Cynthia  refuses  to  marry  Bob  as  long  as 
his  father  withholds  his  consent.  This  consent 
Jethro  manages  to  force  from  Worthington  Senior 
before  he  himself  abdicates  the  reins  of  power. 

Coniston  is  more  than  the  story  of  a  strong 
man  whose  strength  becomes  his  weakness ;  it  is  more 
than  a  study  of  Jacksonian  politics  and  the  life  close 
to  the  soil  of  a  rural  New  England  community ;  it  is 
more  than  a  charming  and  inspiring  love  story  and 
a  series  of  narrative  passages  of  unusual  strength 
and  intensity  and  a  very  high  order  of  literary  merit. 

It  is  a  serious  and  convincing  study,  almost  in 
words  of  one  syllable,  of  the  genesis  and  rise  of  the 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  327 

Boss  in  American  politics;  beginning  in  the  days 
when  his  neighbors  voted  in  Jethro  Bass  as  head 
selectman  of  the  town  of  Coniston  because  he  and 
his  lieutenants  held  mortgages  over  the  heads  of  a 
majority  of  its  qualified  voters;  up  to  the  time  of 
his  decline  and  fall  and  the  final  subjection  of  his 
successors  to  the  big  business  boss  and  the  interstate 
corporation  that  in  the  evolutionary  nature  of  things 
came  to  have  progressively  a  larger  power  of  patron 
age  and  reprisal. 

Jethro  like  other  successful  politicians  of  his 
earlier  type  made  himself  a  machine  of  his  own. 
This  he  ruled  with  a  rod  of  iron.  How  he  did  it,  is 
sufficiently  set  forth  through  a  period  covering  more 
than  the  middle  third  of  the  century  just  passed. 
How  in  turn  this  machine  went  down  before  a  still 
greater  one,  Mr.  Churchill  has  not  chosen  to  show 
us  definitely.  Possibly  he  thought  that  the  later 
demonstration  was  hardly  necessary.  Possibly  he 
thought  that  others  have  handled  the  same  subject 
sufficiently  of  late,  in  literature  and  journalism  alike. 
Possibly  he  thought  that  such  an  attempt  would 
stretch  out  the  book  to  unmanageable  length  and 
draw  the  story  too  far  afield  from  the  localized  in 
tensity  of  interest  that  is  at  once  its  distinctive 
strength  and  charm. 

Mr.  Churchill  is  aware,  as  most  of  us  are  aware, 
that  the  campaign  of  education  in  those  common 
interests  that  affect  us  all  directly  in  America  to 
day  is  inevitably  under  way.  He  is  aware,  as  many 
are  not,  that  this  is  no  fruit  of  a  sudden  growth; 
that  it  is  the  result  of  a  periodic  and  ineradicable 
movement  forward  by  lasting  reform  waves  of  the 


328  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

soul  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  peoples  of  the  world.  He 
tells  us: 

"  Self-examination  is  necessary  for  the  moral 
health  of  nations  as  well  as  men,  and  it  is  the 
most  hopeful  of  signs  that  in  the  United  States  we 
are  to-day  going  through  a  period  of  self-examina 
tion.  .  .  .  McCaulay  said  in  1852,  '  We  now  know 
by  the  clearest  of  all  proof  that  universal  suffrage, 
even  united  with  secret  voting,  is  no  security  against 
the  establishment  of  arbitrary  power.'  James  Rus 
sell  Lowell  a  little  later  wrote,  '  We  have  begun  ob 
scurely  to  recognize  that  .  .  .  popular  government 
is  not  in  itself  a  panacea,  is  no  better  than  any  other 
form  of  government  except  as  the  virtue  and  wisdom 
of  the  people  make  it  so.'  " 

Mr.  Churchill  in  this  book  has  helped  some  hun 
dreds  of  thousands  of  his  countrymen  and  women 
to  realize  this  more  than  obscurely.  He  has  done 
this  by  the  most  simple  and  direct  means ;  by  a  story 
of  the  way  the  lust  and  the  possession  of  power, 
wrongfully  gained  and  abused,  turns  to  dust  and 
ashes  in  a  strong  man's  hands  by  the  embitterment 
of  everything  else  that  he  holds  dear  in  life. 

Jethro  Bass  is  a  man  of  the  people.  At  the  same 
time  he  is  very  much  of  a  Man,  and  the  Man  of  the 
Hour  in  the  period  portrayed.  And  the  story  of 
his  rise  and  fall,  and  of  his  relations  with  Cynthia  and 
her  lover,  has  a  human  interest  about  it  that  ap 
peals  irresistibly  to  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
readers. 

"  She  had  left  him  standing  there  alone  in  the 
cold,  divining  what  was  in  her  heart  as  though  it  was 
in  his  own.  How  worthless  was  this  mighty  power 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  329 

which  he  had  gained,  how  hateful  when  he  could  not 
bestow  the  smallest  fragment  of  it  upon  one  whom 
he  loved?  Someone  has  described  Hell  as  disqualifi 
cation  in  the  face  of  opportunity.  Such  was 
Jethro's  torment  that  morning  as  he  saw  her  drive 
away." 

Mr.  Churchill  has  chosen  to  accentuate  silently 
the  fact  that  the  inevitable  result  of  aggression,  of 
growth  like  Jethro's,  is  to  make  some  woman  or 
women  suffer.  It  does  not  always  happen  in  their 
own  families,  within  their  own  knowledge.  It  did 
less  in  Jethro's  day  than  in  ours.  Books  like  Con- 
iston  help  us  to  realize  the  fact,  to  diagnose  the  evil, 
and  to  take  steps  to  cure  it. 

Coniston  is  a  story  not  merely  of  the  temptations 
and  the  failures  of  the  strong.  Will  Wetherell, 
Cynthia's  father,  is  a  type  of  the  ineffectual  man  of 
culture  and  education  who  washes  his  hands  of 
American  politics  because  they  are  too  dirty  for  an 
American  gentleman  to  mix  with,  and  whose  hell  of 
disqualification  in  the  face  of  opportunity  is  more 
chronic,  if  less  acute,  than  that  of  Jethro  Bass. 

He  and  Cynthia  enter  the  state  capitol  for  the 
first  time  at  the  beginning  of  the  "  Woodchuck  Ses 
sion."  "  They  stood  hand  in  hand  on  the  cool 
marble-paved  floor  of  the  corridor,  gazing  silently 
at  the  stained  and  battered  battle-flags  behind  the 
glass,  and  Wetherell  seemed  to  be  listening  again 
to  the  appeal  of  a  great  President  of  a  great  Nation 
in  the  time  of  her  dire  need  —  the  soul  calling  on 
the  body  to  fight  for  itself." 

Wetherell  feels  the  thrill.  He  goes  away;  and 
nothing  comes  of  it.  It  was  because  of  his  very 


330     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

lovable  weakness  that  Cynthia's  mother  married 
him.  Cynthia  inherits  the  instinct  of  protectiveness 
and  responsibility.  None  of  Wetherell's  neighbors 
and  acquaintances  after  his  removal  from  Boston  to 
Coniston  are  of  his  own  type.  His  daughter  grows 
up  among  men  and  among  mountains  and  the  soul 
of  outdoor  New  England  passes  into  her.  She 
becomes  self-contained  and  self-reliant.  She  values 
learning  for  learning's  sake;  she  reads  the  best 
books  that  are  to  be  had;  she  teaches  school  as  a 
matter  of  course  as  soon  as  she  is  old  enough.  Con 
trary  to  Dr.  Cooper's  assertion,  she  is  distinctly  a 
product  of  environment  up  to  the  time  when  under 
Jethro's  guardianship  she  goes  to  town  to  complete 
her  education. 

Here  she  fails  to  find  herself  at  home.  "  Cyn 
thia  will  always  remember  the  awe  with  which  the 
first  view  of  New  York  inspired  her.  .  .  .  There 
entered  into  her  heart  that  night  a  sense  of  that 
cruelty  which  is  the  worst  cruelty  of  all  —  the 
cruelty  of  selfishness.  Every  man  going  his  own 
pace,  seeking  to  gratify  his  own  aims  and  desires, 
unconscious,  heedless  of  the  want  with  which  he  rubs 
elbows.  Her  natural  imagination  enhanced  by  her 
life  among  the  hills,  the  girl  peopled  the  place  in 
the  street  lights  with  all  kinds  of  strange  evil  doers 
of  whose  sins  she  knew  nothing  .  .  .  adventurers, 
charlatans,  alert  cormorants  who  preyed  upon  the 
unwary." 

It  is  evident  that  Mr.  Churchill  has  no  great  love 
for  certain  characteristic  aspects  of  the  twentieth  cen 
tury  American  city.  It  is  characteristic  of  him  that 
he  has  steered  clear  of  the  tempting  intricacies  of 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  331 

metropolitan  high  finance;  that  he  has  continued  on 
ground  of  his  own  choosing,  which  he  knows  as  he 
knows  the  space  within  the  four  walls  of  his  home, 
to  set  forth  the  common  everyday  results  of  indi 
vidual  and  corporate  greed  and  shirking  of  responsi 
bility  in  words  and  in  incidents  that  a  child  or  a 
negro  could  understand. 

Coniston  has  its  faults.  It  adopts  Thackeray's 
attitude  —  less  ex  cathedra  than  that  of  the  showman 
who  steps  aside  with  us  to  show  us  how  the  wires 
are  pulled  —  a  little  too  freely  for  the  highest  liter 
ary  distinction. 

The  same  tendency  is  even  more  noticeable  in  his 
next  book  which  Dr.  Cooper  passes  over  in  silence  — 
merely  remarking  that  "  it  would  be  an  anticlimax 
after  Coniston  to  examine  in  detail  Mr.  Cr ewe's 
Career,  1908,  which  treats  of  the  same  order  of  cor 
ruption  in  State  politics,  but  deals  with  a  later 
generation  and  in  a  spirit  of  lighter  comedy  "  -  to 
devote  some  four  or  five  hundred  words  to  A  Modern 
Chronicle. 

Mr.  Crewe  is  a  new  force  in  politics:  the  million 
aire  or  multimillionaire  who  is  not  a  big  business 
boss ;  who  has  inherited  money  and  made  more ;  who 
makes  up  his  mind  to  appear  in  the  middle  of  the 
political  arena  as  he  would  on  the  tan  bark  of  the 
Horse  Show;  who  is  determined  that  nothing  shall 
keep  him  from  breaking  into  the  lime-light  and 
becoming  a  Celebrity;  and  who  has  his  ancestral 
millions,  the  approval  of  the  women  of  his  own 
social  circle,  the  unformulated  demand  of  the  masses 
for  reform  and  for  efficiency  in  public  affairs,  and 
the  help  of  a  hired  army  of  small  grafters  and 


S32     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

malcontents  of  the  big  party  machines,  to  back  him. 

In  this  case  equally  with  that  of  The  Celebrity 
Mr.  Churchill  has  adopted  the  same  method  with 
equally  admirable  results.  In  the  latter  book,  which 
deserves  to  be  ranked  on  many  counts  in  the  same 
class  with  Coniston,  the  portrait  is  evidently  that  of 
a  sufficiently  well-known  politician  and  newspaper 
proprietor  of  the  present  day.  Further  than  this 
Mr.  Crewe's  Career  is  a  very  serious  and  effect 
ive  study  of  the  domination  of  the  Railroad  over 
the  native  state  of  Jethro  Bass  ( incontestably  New 
Hampshire)  of  the  methods  of  its  organized  control 
of  power  and  plunder,  of  the  failure  of  one  badly 
planned  and  worse  executed  revolt  against  it,  and  of 
the  gradual  rise  to  power  of  a  man  and  a  type, 
trained  and  fitted  to  survive  and  ultimately  to  con 
tend  on  equal  terms  with  it. 

We  learn  in  the  beginning:  "Jethro  Bass  has 
been  dead  these  twenty  years  and  his  lieutenants  shorn 
of  power.  An  empire  has  arisen  out  of  the  ashes 
of  the  ancient  kingdoms  .  .  .  there  are  no  generals 
now,  no  condottieri  who  can  be  hired;  the  empire  has 
a  paid  and  standing  army,  as  an  empire  should." 

Hilary  Vane,  life-long  friend  and  chief  corpora 
tion  counsel  of  Mr.  Flint  of  New  York,  New  Hamp 
shire  and  several  other  states,  czar  of  the  empire  in 
question,  is  commander-in-chief  of  the  empire's  legal 
and  political  forces.  Hilary  is  one  of  the  last  ex 
tinct  examples  of  the  old  school  of  honest  grafters. 
His  private  life  is  above  reproach.  He  lives  alone 
with  an  elderly  New  England  housekeeper,  in  an  old 
New  England  house  in  an  old  New  England  town 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  333 

which  happens  to  be  the  state  capital,  till  his  only 
son  Austin,  who  has  drifted  West  after  the  close  of 
his  college  days,  and  drifted  East  again  after  being 
forced  to  shoot  a  man  for  reasons  not  of  his  own 
choosing,  comes  back  to  live  with  him. 

Austin  Vane,  like  Stephen  Brice,  decides  to  study 
and  to  practice  law.  He  does  not  study  and  prac 
tice  law  and  politics,  however,  as  his  father  did  be 
fore  him.  Nobody  could  rightfully  accuse  Hilary 
Vane  of  profiting  dishonestly,  according  to  his  own 
private  code  of  honor,  by  the  practices  by  which  the 
railroad  gained  and  retained  its  ascendency.  None 
the  less,  he  believes  with  all  his  heart  and  soul  that 
the  empire  of  the  railroad  is  necessary  for  the  pres 
ervation  of  law,  order  and  satisfactory  business  con 
ditions. 

Austin  comprehends  his  father's  point  of  view 
perfectly,  and  is  unwilling  to  accept  it  without  res 
ervations.  He  takes  and  wins  a  case  against  the 
railroad  for  a  farmer  who  has  been  injured  by  a  train 
at  an  unflagged  crossing. 

After  the  split  comes,  the  two  men  continue  for 
some  time  to  live  together  in  the  same  house  after 
the  manner  of  New  England  —  outwardly  composed, 
inwardly  irreconcilable. 

In  the  meantime,  Humphrey  Crewe  has  gone  into 
politics.  He  decides  to  run  for  the  State  legisla 
ture.  Concerning  this  Mr.  Churchill  remarks  in 
passing :  "  For  years  a  benighted  people  with  a 
fond  belief  in  their  participation  of  republican  in 
stitutions  have  elected  the  noble  Five  Hundred  of  the 
House  and  the  staunch  Twenty  of  the  Senate. 


334     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

"  Noble  Five  Hundreds  (biggest  legislature  in  the 
world)  have  come  and  gone,  kicked  over  the  traces, 
and  even  wept  —  to  no  avail.  Behold  that  political 
institution  of  man :  representative  government." 

Mr.  Crewe  desires  to  be  elected  to  the  assembly  on 
a  platform  of  progress.  He  has  a  good  roads  bill, 
he  has  a  forestry  bill,  he  has  bushels  of  others,  all 
of  which  he  has  duly  typewritten  or  printed  and 
mailed  to  everybody  of  importance  in  the  state.  He 
sees  Mr.  Flint's  head  man  of  business  in  politics  and 
in  his  residential  district;  somewhat  unwillingly  he 
puts  up  the  equivalent,  in  U.  S.  currency,  for  politi 
cal  preferment ;  he  gives  garden  parties  to  his  rural 
neighbors,  at  which  he  displays  the  tact  of  a  rhinoc 
eros  and  the  diplomacy  of  a  steam  locomotive;  and 
eventually  he  takes  his  seat  among  the  other  noble 
499.  Here,  during  the  course  of  the  session,  he  finds 
his  bills  pigeonholed  one  by  one,  and  himself  re 
garded  as  a  joke  where  he  is  not  a  source  of  revenue. 

Victoria  Flint,  who  has  known  him  from  childhood, 
is  not  inclined  to  take  him  over-seriously ;  though 
some  months  later,  when  he  has  made  up  his  mind  to 
run  for  governor  on  a  popular  anti-railroad  plat 
form,  he  decides  that  she  will  make  exactly  the  kind 
of  a  wife  that  he  needs  to  round  out  his  political 
career. 

Victoria  does  learn  to  take  Austin  Vane  seriously, 
as  the  result  of  friction  between  him  and  her  father 
and  his  own.  Eventually  she  comes  to  discuss  the 
question  of  the  railroad  in  politics  with  Austin  him 
self. 

"  Conditions  as  they  exist  are  the  result  of  a  revo 
lution  for  which  no  one  man  is  responsible.  That 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  335 

does  not  alter  the  fact  that  the  conditions  are  wrong. 
But  the  railroads,  before  they  consolidated,  found 
the  political  boss  in  power,  and  had  to  pay  him  for 
favors.  The  citizen  was  the  culprit  then,  just  as 
he  is  now,  because  he  does  not  take  sufficient  inter 
est  in  his  government  to  make  it  honest.  We 
mustn't  blame  the  railroads  too  severely  when  they 
grew  strong  for  substituting  their  own  political  army 
to  avoid  being  blackmailed.  Long  immunity  has  re- 
enforced  them  in  the  belief  that  they  have  but  one 
duty  —  to  pay  dividends.  I  am  afraid,"  he  added, 
"  that  they  will  have  to  be  enlightened  somewhat  as 
Pharaoh  was  enlightened." 

Mr.  Churchill,  here  as  always,  is  fair  and  no  more 
than  fair  to  every  factor  in  the  problem.  The  main 
issue,  the  definite  moral  of  Coniston  and  its  suc 
cessor,  is  that  most  of  all  this  condition  of  affairs  is 
the  people's  fault  because  they  permit  it.  In  other 
words,  graft  is  the  price  that  they  pay  for  political 
negligence.  Austin  Vane  thinks  that  a  change  is 
coming. 

"  '  I  believe  such  practices  are  not  necessary  now. 
...  A  new  generation  has  come  ...  a  generation 
more  jealous  of  its  political  rights,  and  not  so  will 
ing  to  be  rid  of  them  by  farming  them  out.  A 
change  has  taken  place  even  in  the  older  men.  .  .  . 
Men  of  this  type  who  could  be  leaders  are  ready  to 
assume  their  responsibilities,  are  ready  to  deal  fairly 
with  railroads  and  citizens  alike.  This  is  a  matter 
of  belief.  I  believe  it.  Mr.  Flint  and  my  father 
do  not.' 

"  t  And  the  practices  are  —  bad?  '  "  Victoria  asked. 

"  *  They  are  entirely  subversive  of  the  principles  of 


336     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

American  government,  to  say  the  least,'  replied  Aus 
tin  grimly." 

None  the  less,  Mr.  Crewe's  Career  is  far  from 
grim.  There  is  delicious  comic  relief  in  Humphrey's 
dealings  with  all  and  sundry,  including  Alicia  Pom- 
fret  (whom  he  finally  marries  after  Victoria  has  de 
clined  the  honor  of  rounding  out  his  career)  and 
other  women  of  her  class,  who  think  that  Dear  Hum 
phrey's  effort  to  bring  politics  up  to  the  level  of  the 
gentleman  is  only  to  be  compared  to  that  of  titled 
Conservatives  in  England,  and  whose  efforts  to  do 
some  electioneering  for  him  on  their  own  account,  in 
the  vicinity  of  the  New  Hampshire  summer  colony 
where  he  lives,  are  neither  highly  appreciated  nor 
brilliantly  successful. 

Austin  refuses  a  practically  unanimous  nomination 
for  governor  against  the  railroad's  machine  candi 
date,  when  he  finds  that  his  father,  whose  life  hangs 
in  the  balance  as  a  result  of  overwork  and  the  trouble 
with  his  son,  has  set  his  heart  on  winning  this  final 
victory  for  the  empire  with  which  he  is  about  to  sever 
relations. 

Mr.  Crewe's  boom  collapses  like  a  pricked  bubble 
after  a  sufficient  number  of  ballots  have  been  taken 
at  the  nominating  convention,  and  after  the  dele 
gates  instructed  to  vote  for  him  have  earned  and 
received  their  pay.  After  the  machine  has  won  for 
what  is  possibly  the  last  time,  Austin  Vane  goes  to 
see  Mr.  Flint  to  deliver  papers  entrusted  to  him  by 
his  father,  who  is  in  bed,  in  danger  of  his  life. 

"  It  does  not  matter,"  said  Austin,  "  whether  the 
New  England  Railroads  have  succeeded  in  nomina 
ting  and  electing  a  governor  to  whom  they  can  die- 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  337 

tate,  and  who  will  reappoint  the  Railroad  Commis 
sion  and  other  state  officials  in  their  interest.  The 
practices  by  which  you  have  controlled  this  state, 
Mr.  Flint,  are  doomed. 

"  However  necessary  these  practices  may  have  been 
from  your  point  of  view,  they  violated  every  princi 
ple  of  free  government,  and  were  they  to  continue, 
the  nation  to  which  we  belong  would  inevitably  de 
cay  and  deserve  the  scorn  of  the  world.  Those  prac 
tices  depended  on  a  condition  .  .  .  which  is  in  itself 
the  most  serious  of  ills  in  a  republic  —  the  ignorant 
disregard  of  the  voter. 

"...  You  have  asked  me  what  in  my  opinion 
would  happen  if  you  ceased  ...  to  take  an  interest 
in  the  political  affairs  of  this  State. 

"  I  believe  .  .  .  that  the  public  opinion  which  ex 
ists  to-day  would  protect  your  property,  and  I  base 
that  belief  on  the  good  sense  of  the  average  Amer 
ican  voter.  ...  On  the  other  hand  .  .  .  the  cor 
poration  will  suffer  much  more  if  a  delayed  justice 
is  turned  into  vengeance. 

"  You  ask  me  what  I  should  do.  I  should  recog 
nize  frankly  the  new  conditions  ...  I  should  an 
nounce  openly  that  from  this  day  onward  the  New 
England  Railroads  depended  for  fair  play  on  an  en 
lightened  public  .  .  .  and  I  think  your  trust  would 
be  well  founded  and  your  course  vindicated." 

From  which  it  may  seem  that  Austin  Vane  in  his 
political  beliefs  was  somewhat  in  advance  of  his  time. 
Readers  may  judge  for  themselves  if  he  and  Victoria 
both  were  not  in  other  ways  equally  above  the  aver 
age  of  people  that  one  is  apt  to  meet  any  day  in 


338     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

New  Hampshire  or  New  York  or  any  one  of  forty 
more  free  and  sovereign  states. 

In  the  end :  "  They  spoke  quietly  of  places  they 
had  both  visited,  of  people  whom  they  had  known  in 
common,  until  they  came  to  the  hills  .  .  .  the  very 
threshold  of  Paradise  on  that  September  evening. 
.  .  .  '  I  sometimes  wonder,'  she  said,  '  whether  hap 
piness  and  achievement  go  together.'  .  .  .  And  yet 
would  the  eagle  ever  attempt  the  great  nights  if 
contentment  were  on  the  plains?  Find  the  main 
spring  of  achievement  and  you  hold  in  your  hand 
the  secret  of  the  world's  mechanism.  Some  aver 
that  it  is  a  woman. 

"  Do  the  gods  ever  confer  the  rarest  of  gifts  upon 
him  to  whom  they  have  given  pinions?  Do  they 
mate  him  ever  with  another  who  soars  as  high  as  he, 
who  circles  higher,  that  he  may  circle  higher  still? 
Who  can  say?  " 

For  those  who  like  their  stories  to  end  unfinished, 
I  with  their  problems  unsolved,  Mr.  Crewes  Career 
presents  an  excellent  study  of  America  in  solution, 
and  on  its  way  —  somewhere  —  to-day  and  to-mor 
row.  Austin  Vane  and  his  wife  are  obviously  rep 
resentatives  of  the  little  leaven  that  is  taking  its 
time  about  leavening  the  whole  lump ;  quite  as  obvi 
ously  as  they  are,  like  Cynthia  Wetherell,  children  of 
New  England  and  its  mountains.  Just  how  far  Aus 
tin  is  also  symbolic  of  the  new  leadership  that  comes 
from  the  West  and  Middle  West  to-day  is  doubtful. 
Stephen  Brice  was  born  again  through  contact  with 
men  like  Lincoln.  Austin  and  Victoria  Vane  have  to 
find  their  inspiration  in  one  another  and  the  open 
air.  Austin  and  his  closest  followers  are  as  obvi- 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  339 

ously  of  the  new  order  as  Mr.  Flint,  Austin's  father 
and  the  rest  of  the  mercenary  forces  of  the  empire 
are  of  the  old.  And  yet  Austin  and  his  friends  and 
clients,  Jabe  Jenney,  Zeb  Meader,  John  Redbrook 
and  all  the  rest,  are  of  the  common  people.  They 
are  of  the  soil ;  they  have  the  strength  of  it ;  they  are 
real  and  vital,  as  their  interests  and  personalities 
are  the  common  every-day  experiences  of  the  great 
democratic  and  inevitable  values  of  life. 

They  have  the  grim  humor  and  shrewd  foresight 
of  their  race.  They  see  through  the  pretense  and 
self-exploitation  of  Mr.  Crewe.  They  are  able  to 
make  a  huge  joke  of  his  downfall.  At  the  same  time 
they  are  equally  ready  to  realize  that  the  movement 
that  Austin  Vane  represents  has  come  to  stay;  and 
there  is  no  doubt  whatever  about  their  intention  to 
stay  with  it. 

It  is  probable  that  if  Mr.  Cr ewe's  Career  had 
been  published  anonymously  by  the  same  firm,  and 
had  had  its  fair  share  of  luck  at  the  start,  it  would 
be  better  known  and  esteemed  than  it  is  to-day.  At 
present  it  suffers  temporary  and  partial  eclipse  from 
the  inevitable  comparison  with  Coniston,  of  whose 
author  it  may  justly  be  said  that  no  American  nov 
elist  since  the  days  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  has  so 
finely  and  inspiringly  set  forth  the  soul  of  New  Eng 
land  on  paper. 

Mr.  Crewe's  Career,  like  the  author's  earlier 
books,  is  admirably  adapted  in  subject  and  method 
to  represent  the  period  of  which  it  treats.  If  in  its 
diversity  of  modern  interests  and  means  of  approach 
to  its  central  problem,  it  lacks  the  dignity  and  classic 
severity  of  Coniston,  the  fault  is  quite  as  much 


340      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  period's  as  the  author's.  As  it  is,  there  is  prob 
ably  no  American  novel  of  anything  like  the  first 
rank  that  is  so  successful,  in  so  many  ways,  in  han 
dling  the  hardest  (and  the  most  complex)  period  of 
the  world's  history  to  handle  in  fiction  or  any  other 
art  —  that  in  which  we  are  living  to-day. 

Mr.  Cr ewe's  Career,  like  Coniston,  shows  a  sus 
tained  growth  of  power  and  flexibility  of  equipment 
in  Mr.  Churchill's  art  that  should,  some  day,  if 
he  lives,  go  far  to  reconcile  achievement  with  his 
admittedly  high  ambitions  and  his  notoriously  pains 
taking  method  of  work,  which  has  caused  him  more 
than  once  to  devote  periods  of  two,  three  or  four 
years  to  the  production  of  a  single  volume. 

In  A  Modern  Chronicle,  1910,  Dr.  Cooper  thinks 
it  is  rather  exasperating  to  see  by  how  narrow 
a  margin  Mr.  Churchill  has  missed  doing  a  big 
piece  of  work.  He  also  wonders  that  no  one  has 
taken  the  trouble  to  point  out  that  in  all  his  earlier 
books  the  portrayal  of  women  was  one  of  Mr.  Church 
ill's  serious  deficiencies.  He  also  calls  Dorothy  Man 
ners  colorless,  and  Cynthia  Wetherell  an  impossible 
symbol  of  all  the  virtues  at  once.  He  is  surprised 
to  find  in  Honora  Leffingwell  "  a  woman  who  is  really 
alive,  a  woman  full  of  illogical  moods  and  caprices 
(not  a  man's  woman  like  the  other  two),  a  woman 
who,  take  her  from  start  to  finish,  is  very  nearly, 
though  not  quite,  a  consistent  piece  of  characteriza 
tion.  .  .  .  Her  second  marriage  for  love  proves  as 
great  a  failure  as  her  first  marriage  for  ambition. 
.  .  .  Then  Peter  Erwin,  her  childhood  friend,  drifts 
into  view  again,  and  we  leave  her  on  the  brink  of  a 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  311 

third  matrimonial  experiment.  Just  a  succession  of 
episodes,  you  see ;  the  story  of  a  woman  who  does  not 
know  her  own  mind.  The  disillusion  and  unrest  of 
the  first  marriage  is  good  workmanship ;  so  is  also 
the  dragging  weariness  and  heartache  of  that  year 
in  the  divorce  colony.  But  the  book  lacks  finality. 
There  is  no  good  reason  for  supposing  that  the  third 
marriage,  the  marriage  of  sympathy  and  pity,  will 
turn  out  one  whit  better  than  the  other  two." 

Dr.  Cooper  stands  self-convicted  on  more  occasions 
than  one  in  his  series  of  Some  American  Story  Tell 
ers,  1911,  of  writing  down  or  up  to  his  particular 
section  of  the  literary  grandstand;  of  carelessness, 
slovenliness  in  literary  finish,  superficiality,  and  of 
conscious  or  unconscious  misrepresentation.  In  this 
particular  instance  it  is  no  more  than  charitable  to 
suppose  that  pressure  of  work  prevented  revision. 

In  conclusion,  under  the  head  of  HIS  FUTURE, 
he  gives  Mr.  Churchill  between  three  and  four 
hundred  words  to  the  effect  that  he  is  popular,  that 
his  popularity  remains  a  constant  quality,  that  he 
builds  his  books  solidly,  with  a  scrupulous  regard  for 
truth  —  qualities  that  Mr.  Cooper  professes  to  ad 
mire  even  where  he  fails  to  exemplify  them  himself. 

He  further  suggests  that  Mr.  Churchill  "  has  been 
taken  rather  too  seriously  by  the  present  generation 
in  the  same  way  that  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  has  been 
overrated  by  her  contemporaries.  Of  the  two  writ 
ers,  it  seems  a  fairly  safe  prediction  that  Mr.  Churchill 
has  a  rather  better  chance  of  maintaining  his  present 
level  in  the  years  to  come.  He  is  still  young  and  his 
later  work  shows  a  real  gain  in  the  knowledge  of  what 


342     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

fiction  as  a  serious  literary  form  should  mean.  There 
is  every  reason  to  believe  that  his  best  and  biggest 
work  is  yet  to  come." 

Inasmuch  as  Dr.  Cooper  begins  his  little  final 
pronunciamento  with  the  statement  that  "  regard 
ing  Mr.  Churchill's  place  in  American  fiction,  it  is 
possible  to  speak  with  more  confidence  than  in  the 
case  of  most  of  his  contemporaries,"  there  is  to  any 
one  who  calls  to  mind  Mrs.  Ward's  present  age,  and 
the  deteriorating  quality  of  most  of  her  later  novels, 
an  unconscious  humor  about  Dr.  Cooper's  placing 
of  Mr.  Churchill  that  comes  as  a  refreshing  relief 
at  the  close  of  an  article  which  for  priggishness, 
pretentiousness,  narrowness,  amateurishness,  super 
ficiality,  general  futility  and  absence  of  inspiration 
and  critical  discernment  has  rarely  been  rivaled  in 
any  American  periodical  —  not  even  in  The  Book 
man  itself. 

In  a  more  extended  review  of  A  Modern  Chron 
icle,  in  the  same  copy  of  The  Bookman,  by  Miss 
Jeannette  L.  Gilder  —  equally  an  example  of  how  not 
to  criticize  —  we  learn  that  "  Honora  Leffingwell  is 
of  the  Lily  Bart  type,  but  I  do  not  find  her  as  ap 
pealing  as  Mrs.  Whar ton's  heroine.  I  could  have 
wept  over  the  sad  fate  of  Lily,  but  the  tragedies  of 
Honor a's  fate  leave  me  cold.  There  was  really  no 
excuse  for  her  goings  on  unless  you  set  it  down  to 
temperament.  ...  I  cannot  help  feeling  that  Peter 
Erwin  was  a  man  of  great  courage.  .  .  .  Mr. 
Churchill  has  indeed  given  us  a  modern  chronicle, 
and  there  is  nothing  about  the  way  divorces  are  ob 
tained  that  he  does  not  tell  us.  I  think,  however, 
that  he  is  mistaken  in  the  attitude  of  '  society  ' 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  343 

toward  the  divorces.  Even  when  the  post-divorced 
husband  stands  waiting  at  the  church,  society  is  sel 
dom  shocked  if  the  contracting  parties  belong  to  its 
inner  circle. 

"  Mr.  Churchill  has  written  a  well  worked  out 
story.  ...  It  is  very  true  to  certain  phases  of  life 
as  lived  in  America  to-day,  unfortunately  too  true. 
And  it  is  a  warning  to  husbands  not  to  neglect  their 
wives  for  business,  particularly  when  their  wives  are 
young  and  attractive." 

We  are  inclined  to  hope  that  Mr.  Churchill  will 
take  the  reception  of  his  last  book  as  a  warning  not 
to  neglect  his  legitimate  business  and  political  ac 
tivities  in  literature  for  the  cult  of  the  superfluous 
women. 

Such  a  woman  Honora  showed  herself  unmistaka 
bly  to  be  in  the  course  of  the  story,  though  several 
men  wanted  to  marry  her,  and  three  of  them  suc 
ceeded.  Hitherto  Mr.  Churchill's  heroines  have  been 
men's  women,  as  a  rule  sympathetically  handled,  and 
admirable  and  inspiring  portraits  and  characteriza 
tions.  Honora,  like  her  suitors,  is  well  enough  done 
in  a  way;  she  is  sufficiently  true  to  life  to  make  us 
feel,  when  we  have  finished  the  book,  that  the  author 
and  ourselves  have  wasted  an  undue  amount  of  time 
and  thought  on  her. 

In  her  own  estimation,  and  in  the  minds  of  many 
who  see  and  suffer  most  from  her,  the  importance  of 
that  particular  phase  and  type  of  American  woman 
hood  has  been  decidedly  overrated. 

We  are  inclined  to  feel  that  Mr.  Churchill  has 
fallen  for  the  moment  into  the  popular  error.  None 
the  less,  we  may  hope  that  in  The  Inside  of  the 


344     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Cup,  whose  publication  is  announced  for  1913,  Mr. 
Churchill  will  return  to  wider  fields  of  usefulness 
where  former  experience  is  able  to  make  him  more 
convincingly  at  home. 

In  the  meantime,  Dr.  Cooper  to  the  contrary,  there 
is  no  vast  technical  advance  over  Coniston  and  Mr. 
Crewe's  Career  displayed  by  A  Modern  Chronicle, 
and  the  problem  of  Mr.  Churchill's  literary  future  re 
mains  as  much  to  be  worked  out  in  the  minds  of  his 
most  sympathetic  and  discerning  critics  as  in  the 
varying  factors  of  his  own  personality. 

One  thing  at  least  is  certain  concerning  this  pres 
ent  day  American  novelist  and  his  work.  If  in 
Twentieth  Century  American  literature  Norris  is  al 
ready  immortal  as  poet  and  prophet,  Phillips  almost 
equally  so  as  a  radical  and  social  vivisector,  while 
Stewart  Edward  White  bids  fair  to  join  the  two  others 
as  a  pioneer  and  spokesman  for  outdoor  America,  it 
is  highly  probable  that,  as  long  as  American  fiction 
is  viewed  in  the  mass  and  detail,  the  name  of  the 
author  of  Richard  Carvel  and  Coniston,  the  creator 
of  Stephen  Brice  and  Austin  Vane,  will  be  remem 
bered  as  the  creator  of  an  ideal  of  the  American 
gentleman  (in  the  best  sense  of  two  much  abused 
terms)  that  this  century  of  all  centuries  is  very  ill 
prepared  to  do  without. 

In  an  era  of  mob  rule  in  literature  and  in  life, 
Winston  Churchill  stands  distinguished  by  qualities 
that  old  St.  Louis  and  Annapolis  (where  he  was  grad 
uated  in  1894)  still  inculcate ;  qualities  that  still  make 
for  justice,  courage,  truth,  dignity  and  the  distinc 
tion  of  conscious  rectitude ;  that  are  as  comparatively 
unknown  in  their  most  finished  form,  to  most  of  us 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  345 

nowadays,  as  they  seem  to  be  to  Dr.  Cooper  and  the 
majority  of  his  fellow-critics  and  partisans  of  an  ar 
tistic  modernity  that  is  in  no  true  sense  either  mod 
ern  or  artistic. 

There  is  an  unmistakable  likeness  between  Mr. 
Churchill  himself  as  we  see  him  through  his  books  and 
through  his  own  most  successful  male  portraits  — 
with  the  exception  of  Jethro  Bass  —  and  the  heroes 
of  Thackeray,  of  which  Colonel  Newcome  is  at  once 
the  prototype  and  finest  flower. 

And  it  is  not  too  much  to  expect  that  in  the  minds 
of  posterity,  throughout  the  Anglo-Saxon  world,  the 
novels  and  characterizations  of  these  two  authors  will 
remain  permanently  paired. 


VIII 

CULTURE    AND    EDITH    WHARTON 

"  The  atmosphere  of  that  big  house,  with  its  army  of  serv 
ants,  the  impossibility  of  doing  anything  for  himself,  and  the 
feeling  of  hopeless  insulation  from  the  vivid  and  necessitous 
sides  of  life,  galled  him  greatly  .  .  .  these  people  who  seemed 
to  lead  an  existence  as  it  were  smothered  under  their  own 
social  importance  .  .  .  they  were  good  specimens  of  their 
kind,  neither  soft  nor  luxurious  as  things  went  in  a  degenerate 
and  extravagant  age;  they  evidently  tried  to  be  simple.  .  .  . 
Fate  had  been  too  much  for  them.  What  human  spirit  could 
emerge  untrammeled  and  unshrunken  from  that  great  encom 
passing  host  of  material  advantages?"  John  Galsworthy, 
The  Patrician,  1910. 

"  As  cleverness  is  the  presiding  genius  that  sits  at  Mrs. 
Atherton's  elbow  keeping  one  constantly  responding  to  the 
digs  and  winks,  if  one  may  speak  vulgarly,  of  its  sparkling 
personality,  so  with  Mrs.  Wharton  it  is  breeding.  Breeding 
is,  as  it  were,  a  luxury  of  hers,  a  cult,  and  one  is  subcon 
sciously,  and  yet  consciously,  aware  of  her  behind  the  book, 
seated  in  a  graceful  and  composed  attitude,  while  she  ar 
ranges  the  incidents  and  characters  according  to  her  intricate 
design."  Hildegarde  Hawthorne,  The  Burning  Bush. 

THIS  woman's  estimate  of  our  most  distinguished 
woman  in  American  literature,  taken  from  the  final 
essay  in  Woman  and  Other  Women,  1908,  where 
Mrs.  Wharton's  work  is  contrasted  unfavorably  with 
Gorky's  Mother,  comes  close  enough  to  the  truth 
to  be  taken  as  something  more  than  the  expression 
of  mere  personal  prejudice  or  literary  facility. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  modernity  and  literature 
for  literature's  sake  alone,  one  may  say  offhand  that, 

in   The  House  of  Mirth,   1905,   and   The  Fruit   of 

346 


EDITH  WHARTON  347 

the  Tree,  1907,  Mrs.  Wharton  has  achieved  the  two 
biggest,  and  at  the  same  time  the  two  most  artistic, 
novels  that  any  one  woman  has  ever  written. 

Purists  in  technique  have  some  excuse  for  prefer 
ring  Jane  Austen,  George  Sand  at  her  best  techni 
cally  —  in  her  simplest  and  most  human  tales  of 
French  country  life  —  or  certain  women  of  the  mod 
ern  Parisian  school  of  fiction,  whose  view  of  life  is 
often  far  from  simple,  and  as  frequently  inhuman  as 
provincial. 

It  is  comparatively  easy  to  pick  flaws  in  Mrs. 
Wharton's  prose  as  well  as  her  verse ;  her  occasional 
blemishes  stand  out  the  sharper  in  contrast  with  her 
more  uniform  excellencies  of  finish  and  decorative 
scheme. 

Any  direct  comparison  between  George  Eliot  and 
Edith  Wharton,  book  by  book  and  page  by  page,  op 
erates  adversely  against  both.  Mrs.  Wharton  at 
her  best  is  distinctly  the  greater  artist,  just  as  George 
Eliot  is  incomparably  the  broader  and  finer  person 
ality,  and  a  human  document  of  more  lasting  and  sin 
cere  significance. 

To  say  to-day  that  the  Englishwoman  has  the 
deeper  wisdom  of  the  heart  is  not  so  much  to  reflect 
on  varying  personal  capacities  and  limitations  as  to 
recognize  clearly  that  each  is  in  her  way  a  very  cred 
itable  type  and  product  of  diverse  environments :  one 
of  middle-class  Mid- Victorian  England;  the  other  of 
patrician  Boston,  the  Berkshires,  New  York  —  of  a 
twentieth  century  America,  where  a  government  of 
money  by  money  and  for  money,  and  its  most  im 
mediate  gratifications  and  capitalized  graces  and  re 
finements,  obtains  to-day. 


348     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

As  a  human  being  Mrs.  Wharton's  personal  equa 
tion  remains  to  be  worked  out  in  detail,  if  not  in  mass ; 
as  an  artist  she  is  essentially  an  academician.  And 
as  an  academician  of  far  higher  and  finer  powers  and 
broader  versatility  than  the  usual  run  of  literary  and 
artistic  standpatters,  she  challenges  criticism.  And 
if  she  has  any  volition  in  the  matter,  being  so  evi 
dently  a  product  of  the  temperamental  and  patrician 
environment,  she  will  doubtless  herself  prefer  to  be  so 
criticised,  differentiated,  distinguished. 

Merely  a  moderate  critical  capacity  and  acquaint 
ance  with  her  work  is  requisite  to  discover  in  Mrs. 
Wharton  an  intellectual  scope  placing  her  immeas 
urably  above  the  average  bridge-playing  woman  of 
her  own  social  class  and  far  in  advance  of  the  mob 
of  men  and  women  writers  who,  for  our  sins  to-day, 
inflict  modern  literature  and  journalism  upon  us  — 
and  to  discover  at  times  flashes  even  of  the  insight  of 
first-rate  genius  that  in  happier  circumstances  might 
have  made  of  her  a  great  poet  or  a  great  scientist. 

Anyone  who  has  read  the  bulk  of  her  work  —  The 
Greater  Inclination,  The  Valley  of  Decision,  The 
House  of  Mirth,  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree,  Ethan 
Frome,  and  certain  of  her  later  failures  to  qualify  for 
the  high  standard  set  by  the  last  two  —  is  bound  to 
feel  at  first  that  she  is  the  one  exception  in  ten 
thousand  that  proves  the  rule;  later  one  more  in 
stance  of  final  failure  in  the  mob  of  American  women 
of  exceptional  cleverness  and  misdirected  energy  who 
seize  or  seek  to  seize  the  shadow  of  life  in  our  na 
tional  race  for  success  while  at  the  same  time  letting 
the  substance  go. 


EDITH  WHARTON  349 

It  is  perhaps  unfair  to  Mrs.  Wharton  to  lay  so 
much  stress  on  the  element  of  cleverness  in  her  early 
works  as  Mr.  Henry  D.  Sedgwick  does  in  his  elabo 
rate  criticism  of  her  method  and  material  in  The 
New  American  Type.  At  the  same  time  his  opin 
ion  is  worth  quoting.  He  says  of  what  he  considers 
her  early  period  of  apprenticeship :  "  How  clever, 
how  wonderfully  clever !  ...  It  is  a  game  that  Mrs. 
Wharton  always  plays,  pitting  herself  against  a  situ 
ation  to  see  how  much  she  can  score.  To  many  peo 
ple  the  point  she  plays  most  brilliantly  is  the  episode. 
...  In  Mrs.  Wharton  the  aptitude  is  not  single  but 
a  combination.  It  includes  the  sense  of  proportion 
...  so  much  to  bring  the  dramatis  persona?  into  the 
ring,  so  much  for  the  preliminary  bouts,  so  much  for 
the  climax,  and  finally  the  proper  length  for  the  re 
cessional.  .  .  .  Some  readers  deem  the  dialogue  the 
strong  point  of  Mrs.  Wharton's  game.  .  .  .  Others 
.  .  .  prefer  the  author's  own  observations  and  com 
ments.  Still  others  like  the  epigrams  or  the  dramatic 
interest  of  the  incident  itself." 

He  goes  on  to  say  that  the  fundamental  fact  of 
Mrs.  Wharton's  femininity  is  conspicuous  in  many 
ways.  "  Her  movements  are  always  feminine  move 
ments,  her  case,  her  poise  are  always  feminine.  .  .  . 
This  fundamental  nervous  restlessness  shows  itself  in 
all  Mrs.  Wharton's  stories,  in  her  rapidity  of  thought, 
of  phrase,  of  dialogue,  in  her  intensity,  her  eager 
ness,  her  rush  of  thought.  The  American  dash,  this 
cascade-like  brilliancy  of  motion  makes  no  doubt,  for 
most  readers,  the  interest  of  the  stories." 

Calvin  Winter,  in  The  Bookman  for  May,  1911, 
says :  "  When  her  first  collection  of  short  stories 


350     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

appeared  in  1899,  under  the  title  of  The  Greater  In 
clination.,  the  most  salient  fact  about  them  and  the 
one  which  brought  swift  recognition,  was  their  ma 
ture  power,  their  finished  art.  .  .  .  The  first  thing 
that  must  strike  a  discriminating  critic  ...  is  that 
he  has  to  do  with  an  author  of  rare  mental  subtlety 
and  unusual  breadth  of  culture;  a  worldly-wise  per 
son  with  rather  wide  cosmopolitan  sympathies  yet  with 
a  rigid  prejudice  of  social  caste.  .  .  .  Next  to  au 
thors  her  favorite  heroes  are  artists.  .  .  .  Her  un 
derstanding  of  human  nature,  her  relentless  pursuit 
of  a  motive,  down  to  its  ultimate  analysis,  her  delib 
erate  stripping  off  of  the  very  last  veils  of  pretense 
and  showing  us  the  sordidness  and  cowardice  of  hu 
man  souls  in  all  their  nudity,  are  unsurpassed  by  any 
other  novelist  living." 

Mr.  Winter  instances  as  epigrammatic  touches 
from  the  short  stories,  three  women :  one  who  dreaded 
ideas  as  much  as  a  draft  in  the  back ;  a  second,  one  of 
the  women  who  make  refinement  vulgar ;  a  third,  most 
of  whose  opinions  were  heirlooms ;  and  a  political  boss 
"  who  had  gulped  his  knowledge  standing,  as  he  had 
snatched  his  food  from  lunch  counters ;  the  wonder 
of  it  lay  in  his  extraordinary  power  of  assimilation  " ; 
and  the  epigrams  "  Genius  is  of  small  use  to  a  woman 
who  does  not  know  how  to  do  her  hair  "  and  "  To 
many  women  such  a  man  would  be  as  unpardonable  as 
to  have  one's  carriage  seen  at  the  door  of  a  cheap 
dressmaker." 

In  so  far  as  the  influence  of  Henry  James  and  his 
most  facile  followers  is  predominant  in  certain  of 
Mrs.  Wharton's  early  and  later  stories,  and  in  so  far 
as  she  consciously  or  unconsciously  panders  to  that 


EDITH  WHARTON  351 

element  of  intellectual  and  cultured  egotism  that  as 
sumes  distinction  as  one  would  assume  a  gown  from 
the  Rue  de  la  Paix  and  pose  in  it  before  a  mirror,  Mr. 
Sedgwick  is  justified  in  his  further  contention  that 
"  her  artistic  and  literary  cultivation  is  distinctly 
American  in  the  sense  that  it  immediately  displays  its 
acquisitions  and  ownership.  .  .  .  Her  culture  de 
clares  the  most  appetizing  dividends.  She  showers 
her  references  and  allusions  to  art  and  letters  with 
the  ready  cleverness  and  lavish  prodigality  with  which 
she  scatters  her  epigrams." 

This  kind  of  thing  does  not  win  her  lasting  respect 
or  a  large  reading  public  among  the  men,  but  there 
are  other  elements  in  her  make-up  that  do.  She  goes 
deeper  than  mere  superficial  brilliancy  and  clever 
ness  for  the  sake  of  cleverness  now  and  then,  in  her 
first  works  as  well  as  in  her  later  ones. 

The  Greater  Inclination  includes  a  prose  tale, 
A  Journey,  whose  intensity  of  realistic  horror  at 
its  climax  goes  far  to  rival  Poe.  In  The  Pelican 
we  have  a  short  story  of  something  less  than  novel 
ette  length,  handled  to  some  extent  in  Mr.  James's 
own  manner,  that  goes  a  step  beyond  anything  he  has 
ever  attempted  or  achieved  in  his  briefer  fiction. 
Like  many  of  Mr.  James's  own  earlier  studies  of 
American  life  abroad,  it  is  a  human  document  in 
contemporary  sociology  from  the  point  of  view  of  an 
unattached  and  scholarly  man  of  the  class  which  Mr. 
James  and  Mrs.  Wharton  naturally  and  inimitably 
interpret.  For  the  art  of  Mrs.  Wharton,  when  it  es 
capes  the  woman's  tendency  to  pose  and  strive  to 
dazzle,  too  often  assumes  the  attitude  towards  hu 
manity  and  the  rest  of  the  cosmos  of  an  elderly  semi- 


352     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

male  Minerva  sprung  full  fledged  from  the  brain  of 
some  scholar  and  man;  of  leisure,  whose  attitude 
towards  life  is  not  invariably  and  inevitably  what  may 
be  described  as  distinctly  jovial  in  the  conventional 
sense  of  the  term. 

On  the  contrary,  there  is  a  certain  suggestion 
of  Bessy  Amherst's  father,  Mr.  Langhope  in  The 
Fruit  of  the  Tree.  He  is  said  to  have  possessed 
indolent  acuteness  of  mind,  but  he  appears  to  have 
been  a  father  and  a  grandfather  both,  without  recog 
nizing  or  appreciating  the  fact.  We  are  told  that, 
"  if  he  viewed  the  spectacle  of  life  at  a  big  country 
house  on  Long  Island  more  objectively  than  the 
younger  and  more  rudimentary  members  of  the  house 
party,  it  was  not  because  he  had  outlived  the  sense  of 
its  importance,  but  because  years  of  experience  had  fa 
miliarized  him  with  its  minutest  details ;  and  this  fa 
miliarity  with  the  world  he  lived  in  had  bred  a  pro 
found  contempt  for  any  other." 

There  is  no  doubt  that  Mrs.  Wharton  at  times 
shares  this  attitude  of  Mr.  James  and  Mr.  Lang- 
hope.  There  is  no  doubt  that  she  would  prefer  to 
live  more  in  the  library  (if  anything  worthy  of  the 
name  is  to  be  found  at  a  typical  Long  Island  country 
house)  than  Mr.  Langhope  seems  to  have  done. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  her  literary  faculty  did 
spring  forth  full-grown  and  full-armed  (or  nearly 
so)  into  the  light  of  day  at  a  comparatively  mature 
age;  and  that  partly  as  the  result  of  temperament, 
partly  of  environment,  partly  through  the  mere  pas 
sage  of  time,  it  contained  and  contains  comparatively 
little  of  the  elasticity  of  youth  and  youth's  divine 
capacity  of  readjustment  and  realignment. 


EDITH  WHARTON  353 

There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that,  up  to  the  time  of 
the  publication  of  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree,  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton,  in  her  literary  growth  and  expansion,  did  wonder 
fully  well  with  what  she  had. 

If,  as  Mr.  Sedgwick  suggests,  her  talent  savors 
too  much  of  the  result  of  reading  and  a  second-hand 
acquaintance  with  life,  enforced  by  the  artificial  stand 
ards  and  the  patrician  exclusiveness  of  the  class  that 
she  represents ;  if  her  romance  is  either  artificial  or 
conspicuously  absent,  and  her  realism  incomplete  and 
inconclusive;  if  she  never  has  or  had  the  child's 
heart  and  the  child's  sense  of  wonder  and  delight  in 
life  as  a  first-hand  medium,  which  the  world's  greatest 
novelists  have  shared  with  the  world's  greatest  poets : 
there  is  comparatively  little  to  be  gained  by  quarrel 
ing  with  her  for  all  that. 

If  she  has  failed  to  give  us  what  the  world  rightly 
expects  from  the  world's  most  inspired  and  inspiring 
interpreters  in  prose  and  verse,  she  has,  on  the  other 
hand,  given  us  a  great  deal  that  we  may  rightly 
thank  her  for.  She  has  done  more  than  a  little  to 
further  the  cause  of  literary  art  and  literary  artisan- 
ship  in  America ;  and  there  is  very  little  more  than 
the  irreducible1  minimum  of  morbidness,  decadence 
and  cynicism  in  the  handling  of  such  material  as  she, 
in  common  with  Mr.  James,  has  sometimes  chosen  to 
handle. 

There  is  noticeable  in  her  at  times  her  sex's  tend 
ency  to  give  her  sex  away.  This  appears  in  The 
Pelican,  though  she  speaks  through  the  mouth  of  a 
man;  and  on  the  whole  the  exposure  of  fashionably 
false  standards  of  culture  among  American  society 
and  club  women  is  well  warranted.  Concerning  the 


354     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

heroine  of  this  extremely  modern  tragedy  in  little, 
we  are  told :  "  I  don't  think  nature  meant  her  to  be 
intellectual.  .  .  .  Her  mother,  the  celebrated  Astarte 
Pratt,  had  written  a  poem  in  blank  verse  on  the 
Fall  of  Man;  one  of  her  aunts  was  dean  of  a  girls' 
college,  another  had  translated  Euripides.  .  .  . 
With  such  a  family  the  poor  child's  fate  was  sealed 
in  advance.  .  .  . 

"...  She  was  very  pretty  when  I  first  knew  her, 
with  the  sweet  straight  nose  and  short  upper  lip  of 
the  cameo  brooch  divinity,  humanized  by  a  dimple 
that  flowered  in  her  cheek  when  anything  was  said 
possessing  the  outward  attributes  of  humor  without 
its  intrinsic  quality." 

Her  marriage  results  disastrously,  leaving  her  with 
a  very  small  boy  to  bring  up  and  put  through  col 
lege.  The  man  who  tells  the  story  helps  to  start 
her  on  her  lecture  platform  career  of  crime.  "  The 
next  time  that  I  saw  her  was  at  New  York,  when 
she  had  become  so  fashionable  that  it  was  a  part  of 
the  whole  duty  of  woman  to  be  seen  at  her  lectures. 
.  .  .  The  subject  of  the  discourse  (I  think  it  was 
Ruskin)  was  clearly  of  minor  importance  not  only  to 
my  friend  but  to  the  throng  of  well-dressed  and  ab 
sent-minded  ladies  who  rustled  in  late  and  undisguis- 
edly  lost  themselves  in  the  study  of  each  other's  ap 
parel.  .  .  . 

"  I  suspect  that  everyone  of  the  ladies  would  have 
remained  away  had  they  been  sure  that  none  of  the 
others  were  coming.  As  I  listened  I  reproached  my 
self  for  ever  having  suspected  her  of  self-deception 
in  saying  that  she  took  no  pleasure  in  her  work.  I 
was  sure  now  that  she  did  it  only  for  Launcelot, 


EDITH  WHARTON  355 

and,  judging  from  the  size  of  the  audience  and  the 
price  of  the  tickets,  I  concluded  that  Launcelot  was 
having  a  liberal  education." 

He  was.  But  literary  fashions  change;  and  com 
petition  in  supplying  the  demand  of  the  class  that 
his  mother  catered  to  is  on  the  increase.  When  the 
annalist  next  sees  her  some  years  later,  "  she  nerv 
ously  gathered  her  cloak  over  a  gown  that  asked  only 
to  be  concealed  and  shrank  into  a  seat  behind  a  line 
of  prehensile  bipeds  blocking  the  aisle  of  the  car." 

Her  friend  joins  her  other  friends  in  mapping  a 
new  course  of  platform  dietetics  strictly  up  to  date 
and  warranted  obscurely  fashionable;  and  helps  to 
send  her  out  on  the  road  again.  Years  pass ;  Laun 
celot  grows  up,  goes  to  Harvard,  graduates  and 
marries.  His  mother  continues  marvelously  well  pre 
served,  wonderfully  well  gowned,  and  almost  as  fash 
ionable  among  the  newly  rich  and  their  other  exploit 
ers  as  in  her  first  flood  tide  of  success. 

At  the  same  time  her  business  rivals  and  those  who 
have  known  her  longest  have  their  private  doubts 
about  her  boy's  age  and  his  inability  to  support  him 
self.  The  catastrophe  occurs  in  Florida,  where  the 
annalist  meets  Launcelot  as  a  stranger,  meets  his 
mother  also,  and  against  his  will  is  dragged  into  the 
final  eclairissement. 

"  '  We  thought  she  was  the  most  popular  lecturer 
in  the  United  States,  my  wife  and  I  did.  We  were 
awfully  proud  of  it,  too,  I  can  tell  you.  .  .  .'  '  How 
can  you,  Launcelot,  how  can  you !  When  you  didn't 
need  the  money  any  longer,  I  spent  it  all  on  the  chil 
dren,  you  know  I  did  '  .  .  .  '  Yes,  on  lace  christen 
ing  dresses  and  life-size  rocking  horses  with  real 


356  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

manes.  The  kind  of  thing  children  can't  do  with 
out.'  '  Oh,  Launcelot,  Launcelot,  I  loved  them  so ! 
How  can  you  believe  such  falsehoods  about  me?'" 

The  annalist  suggests  that  very  little  can  be  gained 
by  prolonging  the  interview.  Launcelot  agrees  with 
him  abruptly  and  departs  in  haste.  They  hear  the 
lessening  sound  of  his  footsteps  down  the  hotel  cor 
ridor. 

"  When  they  ceased,  I  approached  Mrs.  Annerly, 
who  had  sunk  into  a  chair.  I  held  out  my  hand  and 
she  took  it  without  a  trace  of  resentment  on  her  rav 
aged  face.  '  I  sent  his  wife  a  real  sealskin  jacket  at 
Christmas,'  she  said  with  the  tears  running  down  her 
cheeks." 

This  story  is  almost  as  unique  in  Mrs.  Wharton's 
own  collection  as  it  is  sui  generis  in  the  whole  cate 
gory  of  modern  short  stories.  It  is  an  eminently 
successful  experiment.  It  opens  up  a  field  which  a 
more  disciplined  and  less  diversified  talent  might  have 
worked  considerably  longer  with  substantial  profit  to 
itself  and  others.  It  is  evidently  an  experiment  that 
Mrs.  Wharton  has  not  seen  fit  to  follow  up.  Her 
insight  into  social  shams,  intellectual  snobbery,  and 
the  parasites  of  the  lecture  platform  is  suggestive. 
The  new  light  that  she  throws  on  the  indirect  degra 
dation  achieved  by  fictitious  fashions  in  literature  is 
well  enough  in  its  way.  We  have  only  to  compare 
this  story  with  Mark  Twain's  The  Man  Who  Cor 
rupted  Hadleyburg  and  the  man's  honest  hatred  of  a 
lie  or  special  interest  or  pretense  of  any  sort,  to  see 
clearly  where  Mrs.  Wharton  stands  here  in  her  first 
book.  On  the  whole,  Mr.  Sedgwick's  estimate  of  her 


EDITH  WHARTON  357 

picturesqueness  of  pose  is  fully  justified.  Miss  Haw 
thorne  goes  further. 

"  Mrs.  Wharton,"  she  says,  "  writes  with  a  more 
deliberate  art,  with  a  satisfying  finish.  She  is  wholly 
devoid  of  humor.  But  humor  as  an  asset  in  the 
world  in  which  her  creations  move  would  be  absolutely 
undesirable.  These  people  must  take  each  other  and 
be  taken  with  the  utmost  seriousness.  One  whole 
hearted  laugh  would  melt  their  icicle  existence  entirely 
away  ...  we  hear  every  whisper  of  the  actors  who 
play  their  carefully  thought-out  parts  with  careful 
discretion.  There  will  be  no  shrieks,  no  mess,  no 
broken  heads  or  hearts.  Even  if  there  is  at  times 
an  appearance  of  these  distressing  relics  of  primi- 
tiveness  we  know  it  is  only  an  appearance.  .  .  .  The 
play  being  over,  we  applaud,  we  rise  and  we  depart 
precisely  as  we  entered."  Possibly  Miss  Hawthorne 
thinks  she  does.  Any  counsel  of  perfection,  any  art 
that  rings  as  true,  considered  as  art  merely,  as  that  of 
The  House  of  Mirth  or  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree  — 
which  can  hold  the  average  reader  as  long  as  either 
of  these  books  can  —  is  bound  to  have  some  lasting 
effect  both  on  readers  of  this  sort  and  critics  more 
discerning  if  less  patient  professionally. 

Whether  Mrs.  Wharton  could  draw  another  type 
of  men  and  women  may  be  neither  here  nor  there  in 
Miss  Hawthorne's  estimation.  In  reality,  regarding 
Mrs.  Wharton  herself  as  a  type,  the  matter  is  of  some 
importance  in  any  general  estimate  of  our  national 
literary  assets  present  and  to  come. 

Miss  Hawthorne  tells  us  that  "  there  are  a  great 
many  persons  who  move  through  just  such  a  world  as 


358  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

she  depicts,  and  manage  this  big  business  of  living 
just  as  she  indicates  is  assuredly  true.  It  all  exists, 
and  Mrs.  Wharton  is  interested  in  its  portrayal. 
She  does  it  excellently,  if  somewhat  self-consciously, 
and  we  must  needs  be  grateful,  in  a  hurried  age,  for 
evidences  of  a  love  of  perfection  for  its  own  sake." 

This  love  of  perfection  for  its  own  sake  to  some 
extent  defeats  itself  in  The  Valley  of  Decision. 
Mrs.  Wharton  has  chosen  a  big  theme :  the  whole 
movement  of  Europe  towards  freedom  at  the  period 
approximating  the  French  Revolution.  She  does  not 
measure  up  to  it.  She  does  not  begin  to.  Her  ac 
tors  are  still  actors ;  her  patricians  with  liberal  as 
pirations  are  no  more  real  flesh  and  blood  creations 
and  inspiring  voices  of  the  mind  and  soul  of  man  than 
are  the  conventional,  careful  studies  of  the  average 
scholarly  historian.  Her  multitudes  in  the  valley  of 
eighteenth  century  judgment  have  more  the  effect  of 
supers  marching  and  counter-marching  on  a  crowded 
stage  than  that  of  elemental  and  evolutionary  forces 
demanding  a  reckoning. 

She  has  failed  in  her  aim  in  passing  (because  her 
aim  is  not  essentially  to  drive  straight  to  the  heart 
of  things),  and  in  her  progress  towards  greater  power 
and  a  clearer  delineation  of  the  modern  type  that  she 
so  successfully  represents. 

Of  her  scholarship  and  method  here  Mr.  Sedgwick 
has  this  to  say :  "  Are  not  the  ornaments  too  clin 
quant;  do  not  the  decorations  assert  themselves  too 
presumptuously  and  mar  the  softer  and  more  harmonic 
colors  of  her  groundwork.  ...  If  Mrs.  Wharton 
could  gather  matter,  shear  wool,  as  it  were,  from 
William  Meister,  La  Chatreuse  de  Parme  .  .  .  (and 


EDITH  WHARTON  359 

from  sundry  memoirs  and  other  earlier  novels) 
.  .  .  and  make  an  interesting  novel,  one  might 
fairly  say  that  she  had  done  admirably  to  use 
whatever  material  was  adapted  to  her  purpose.  .  .  . 
One  could  hardly  go  so  far  in  praise  of  The  Valley 
of  Decision  as  to  think  of  it  as  creating  life  out  of 
its  literary  material.  It  did  not  do  that.  It  made 
a  very  interesting  and  agreeable  book." 

Of  this  novel  Mr.  Calvin  Winter  says  in  The  Book 
man  for  May,  1911:  "She  was  saturated  to  her 
finger  tips  with  the  historical  facts  of  the  period, 
the  motley  and  confusing  tangle  of  petty  dukedoms, 
the  warring  claims  of  Austria  and  Spain.  She  gave 
us  not  merely  a  broad  canvas  but  a  moving  panorama 
of  the  life  of  those  restless  times  presenting  with  a 
certain  dramatic  power  the  discontent  of  the  masses, 
the  petty  intrigues  of  Church  and  aristocracy,  the 
gilded  uselessness  of  the  typical  fine  lady  with  her 
cavaliere  servente,  her  pet  monkey  and  her  parrot ; 
the  brutal  ignorance  of  the  peasantry ;  the  disorder 
and  license  of  the  Bohemian  world,  the  strolling  play 
ers  and  mountebanks  —  in  short,  all  the  various  strata 
and  substrata  of  the  social  life  of  the  times.  .  .  . 
Odo  Valesca  and  Fulvia  Vivaldi  sacrifice  their  hap 
piness  to  the  obligations  of  rank,  a  prince's  duty  to 
his  people ;  and  they  do  this  not  in  the  spirit  of  gen 
erous  sacrifice,  but  rather  because  they  recognize  the 
impossibility  of  doing  anything  else." 

Mr.    Sedgwick   has    comparatively    little    fault    to 
find  with  The  House  of  Mirth.     Concerning  this  he 
says:     "Her  mastery  of  the  episode  is  as  dashing 
as  ever  and  more  delicate.     The  chapters  are  a  sue-  "' 
cession  of  tableaux  admirably  posed.     They  remind 


360     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

one  of  the  succession  of  prints  which  constitute  The 
Rake's  Progress.  Like  the  rake,  Lily  Bart  proceeds 
downward  from  point  to  point,  from  Trenor  circle  to 
Gormer  circle,  from  the  Gormers  to  Norma  Hatch, 
from  Norma  to  millinery  .  .  .  each  stage  is  a  dis 
tinct  episode,  a  scene  which  Hogarth,  with  Sir  Joshua 
to  paint  Lily's  picture,  might  have  portrayed.  .  .  . 
Her  luxurious,  artistic  and  literary  information  is 
never  put  obviously  forth,  nevertheless  unjustly  per 
haps,  we  cannot  shake  off  a  somewhat  uncomfortable 
suspicion  that  a  great  deal  of  the  book  is  the  product 
of  culture  rather  than  of  life  itself.  ...  It  is  her 
feeling  for  composition  that  causes  her  to  disregard 
both  determinism  and  realism ;  this  she  deliberately 
sacrifices  for  the  sake  of  obtaining  the  desired  em 
phasis  upon  the  figure  of  central  interest.  .  .  .  This 
mastery  of  composition  is  the  great  artistic  success 
of  the  book  and  justifies  its  immense  success." 

There  is  a  certain  determinism  and  a  realism  of  a 
sort  in  The  House  of  Mirth,  none  the  less.  The 
realism  is  spread  on  so  thinly  or  so  infrequently  that 
one  rarely  notices  it  save  as  an  occasional  shadow  to 
accentuate  the  author's  high  lights.  The  determin 
ism  is  evident  in  the  sense  that  Lily  Bart  is  fated 
from  the  first  to  sink  lower  and  lower,  and  in  the  fact 
that  Mrs.  Wharton  is  determined  temperamentally 
that  Lily  shall  continue  a  picturesque  heroine  to  the 
end. 

If  Lily  and  her  creator  had  had  more  red  blood, 
and  less  blue  blood  or  mere  anaemic  sawdust  in  their 
veins,  the  heroine  might  have  realized  life  at  last  as 
she  sank  deeper  and  deeper  towards  the  bed  rock  of 
existence  as  men  and  women  have  made  it  in  America 


EDITH  WHARTON  361 

to-day.  The  author  might  have  varied  her  treatment 
gradually  through  each  successive  circle  of  Lily's 
Inferno.  In  the  final  tragedy  she  might  come  to 
grips  with  life  herself  —  in  a  style,  and  in  a  setting 
that  somehow  should  have  represented  more  of  the 
misery,  more  of  the  struggle  and  its  transient  re 
wards,  its  doubtful  prophecies  and  promises,  for  mil 
lions  on  Manhattan  Island,  than  the  narrow  stage 
setting  here  provided  for  the  final  appearance  of  the 
ineffectual  central  figure. 

And  just  so  far  as  Lily  Bart  is  ineffectual,  in 
competent,  unfit  to  rouse  any  genuine  interest  or 
sympathy  from  any  man  or  woman  not  of  her  own 
type,  just  so  far  we  are  constrained  to  feel  that 
Mrs.  Wharton  is  ineffectual  and  incompetent  her 
self;  that  she  has  been  trying  to  gain  and  retain 
our  attention  under  false  pretenses;  that,  on  the 
whole,  whatever  the  author's  intention,  the  book 
tends  to  over-emphasize  false  and  artificial  values; 
that  the  author's  time  and  energy  to  a  great  extent 
has  been  wasted  as  well  as  our  own. 

None  the  less  the  book  may  be  profitably  studied 
technically,  and  there  is  a  great  deal  in  it  worth 
quoting  for  one  reason  or  another.  We  find  Lily 
Bart,  who  has  been  brought  up  by  her  mother  to 
believe  that  acquiescence  in  dinginess  is  evidence  of 
stupidity,  sitting  in  the  Grand  Central  Station  be 
tween  trains  one  warm  summer  afternoon  in  the  year 
of  grace  190£  or  thereabouts.  We  are  supposed 
to  ask  if  it  was  possible  that  she  belonged  to  the 
same  race  as  the  commuters  and  other  transients. 
"  The  dinginess,  the  crudity  of  the  average  section 
of  womanhood  made  her  feel  how  highly  specialized 


362     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

she  was.  .  .  .  Everything  about  her  was  at  once  vig 
orous  and  exquisite,  at  once  strong  and  fine." 

A  man  of  her  own  class  meets  her  here  by  chance. 
"  He  had  a  confused  sense  that  she  must  have  cost 
a  great  deal  to  make,  that  a  great  many  dull  and 
ugly  people  must  in  some  mysterious  way  have  been 
sacrificed  to  produce  her.  He  was  aware  that  the 
qualities  distinguishing  her  from  the  herd  were 
chiefly  external."  She  has  tea  with  him,  unchaper- 
oned,  at  his  rooms  near  by ;  she  is  seen  by  another 
man  who  knows  them  both,  on  her  way  out  and  back 
to  the  train  that  is  to  take  her  to  the  next  country 
house  on  her  round  of  visits ;  and  in  this  first  false 
step  in  the  eyes  of  her  world  the  whole  action  of 
the  book  and  her  own  impulse  toward  tragedy  be 
gins. 

It  is  true  that  her  point  of  view  has  already 
been  formed  —  hopelessly.  "  What  a  miserable  thing 
it  is  to  be  a  woman  ...  I  even  know  a  girl  who 
lives  in  a  flat.  ...  Oh  I  know.  .  .  .  But  I  said 
marriageable.  .  .  .  Your  coat  is  a  little  shabby  .  .  . 
but  who  cares.  .  .  .  If  I  were  shabby  no  one  would 
have  me ;  a  woman  is  asked  out  as  much  for  her 
clothes  as  herself." 

It  is  true  that  she  is  the  product  of  fairly  typ 
ical  American  conditions.  "  Ruling  the  turbulent 
element  called  home  was  the  vigorous  and  determined 
figure  of  a  mother  still  young  enough  to  dance  her 
dresses  to  rags,  while  the  hazy  outline  of  a  neutral 
tinted  father  filled  an  intermediate  space  between 
the  butler  and  the  man  who  came  to  wind  the  clocks. 
.  .  .  Lily  seldom  saw  her  father  by  daylight.  All 
day  he  was  '  down-town  '  and  in  winter  it  was  long 


EDITH  WHARTON  363 

after  nightfall  when  she  heard  his  fagged  step  on 
the  stairs  and  his  hand  on  the  schoolroom  door.  .  .  . 
In  summer  when  he  joined  them  for  a  Sunday  at 
Southampton  or  Newport  he  was  even  more  effaced 
and  silent  than  in  winter.  It  seemed  to  tire  him  to 
rest.  .  .  . 

"  Generally  .  .  .  Mrs.  Bart  and  Lily  went  to 
Europe  for  the  summer  and  before  the  steamer  was 
halfway  over  Mr.  Bart  had  dipped  below  the  horizon. 
.  .  .  For  the  most  part  he  was  never  mentioned  or 
thought  of  till  his  patient  stooping  figure  presented 
itself  on  the  New  York  dock  as  a  buffer  between 
the  magnitude  of  his  wife's  luggage  and  the  restric 
tions  of  the  American  Customhouse.  .  .  .  Lily 
could  not  recall  the  time  when  there  was  money 
enough,  and  in  some  vague  way  her  father  always 
seemed  to  blame  for  the  deficiency." 

We  are  told  that  Mrs.  Bart  was  famous  for  the 
unlimited  effect  that  she  produced  on  limited  means ; 
and  that  to  the  lady  in  question  and  her  acquaint 
ance  there  was  "  something  heroic  in  living  as  though 
one  were  much  richer  than  one's  bank  book  denoted  " ; 
and  we  may  assume  that  this  kind  of  thing  is  also 
fairly  typical  here  and  there  in  America  nowadays. 

We  are  made  to  feel  that  it  was  inevitable  that  the 
child  of  such  parents  should  be  handicapped,  after 
their  death  ("  It  was  a  relief  to  Lily  when  her 
father  died."  Mrs.  Bart  died  of  a  "  deep  disgust 
of  dinginess  and  ineffectual  retrenchment.")  bv  a 
mania  for  doing  as  her  mother  had  done  and  a  very 
small  personal  income,  together  with  Bridge  debts, 
milliner's  and  dressmaker's  bills  and  other  inciden 
tals  that  showed  an  increasing  tendency  to  compli- 


364     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

cate  the  otherwise  well  ordered  and  harmonious  cur 
rents  of  her  life.  We  are  informed  that  Lily  played 
Bridge  not  because  she  liked  it,  but  because  she  had 
to  in  order  to  hold  her  job  —  and  to  recoup  her  debts. 
This  becomes  increasingly  difficult  after  she  has 
become  talked  about  and  has  failed  to  entangle  a 
young  multi-millionaire  brought  up  in  the  odor  of 
comparative  sanctity,  whose  mother  learns  at  the 
last  moment  the  inside  history  of  the  woman  her 
son  intends  to  marry. 

Not  long  after  this  Lily  lets  her  host  for  the  time 
being  and  the  husband  of  her  dearest  friend,  also 
for  the  time  being,  take  a  little  flier  in  stocks  for 
her.  It  is  not  till  considerably  later  that  she  real 
izes  the  exact  formula  of  the  conventional  Wall  Street 
deal,  wherein  a  pretty  girl  minus  capital  and  a  Wall 
Street  magnate  minus  conventional  morals,  of  a  type 
that  is  passing,  are  the  dramatis  persona.  When 
she  does  learn  what  is  expected  of  her,  she  repudiates 
her  obligations  with  what  we  are  supposed  to  be 
lieve  virtuous  indignation.  The  Trenor  circle  is 
closed  to  her;  and  she  descends  to  that  of  the  Gor- 
mers  and  other  newly  rich  people,  to  whom  she  can  be 
useful  in  other  ways  besides  serving  merely  as  an 
unpaid  social  secretary  to  her  hostess  for  the  day 
and  hour. 

In  the  meantime  she  has  come  fairly  close  to  fall 
ing  in  love  with  Selden,  the  middle-aged  professional 
man  at  whose  rooms  we  find  her  in  the  first  chapter. 
He  is  as  near  a  hero  as  anyone  in  the  book.  He  is 
as  near  in  love  with  her  as  he  can  be  without  making 
her  see  that  it  is  his  destiny  to  marry  her  and  to 
get  her  out  of  the  mess  she  has  made  of  her  life, 


EDITH  WHARTON  365 

and  that  he  trusts  her  as  well  as  any  woman  that 
he  could  marry  deserves  to  be  trusted. 

Of  him  we  are  told  that  he  had  "  the  keenly 
modeled  dark  features  which,  in  a  land  of  amorphous 
types,  gave  him  the  air  of  belonging  to  a  more 
specialized  race,  of  carrying  the  impress  of  a  con 
centrated  past.  Expansive  persons  found  him  a 
little  dry,  and  very  young  girls  thought  him  sar 
castic." 

He  is  not  making  money  as  fast  as  he  might.  He 
is  not  crudely  tainted  with  commercialism.  He  man 
ages  to  get  a  good  deal  out  of  life  as  it  is.  He  wants 
more. 

"  My  idea  of  success,  he  said,  is  personal  freedom 
.  .  .  Freedom  from  worries  .  .  .  from  everything; 
from  money,  from  poverty,  from  care  and  anxiety, 
from  all  the  material  accidents.  To  keep  a  kind 
of  republic  of  the  spirit,  .  .  .  that's  what  I  call 
success." 

Later  he  inquires :  "  Is  there  any  final  test  of 
genius  but  success  ?  "  Lily  replies  :  "  Success  ?  " 
She  hesitated.  "  Why,  to  get  as  much  as  one  can 
out  of  life  I  suppose.  It's  a  relative  quality  after 
all.  Isn't  that  your  idea  of  it?"  They  fail  to 
settle  the  question  definitely  then  and  there.  This 
is  apparently  one  of  Lily  Bart's  rare  moments. 
Here  as  well  as  later,  she  is  as  far  from  realizing, 
as  her  creator  is,  that  success  consists  in  finding 
yourself  by  helping  others  to  do  the  same,  in  in 
terpreting  or  administering,  truly  and  justly,  some 
place  or  province  of  life  for  the  sake  of  the  work 
and  the  rest  of  the  world  before  your  own ;  in  sub 
ordinating  yourself  and  your  interest,  whatever  your 


366     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

powers  and  possessions,  to  an  efficient  minor  partner 
ship  in  the  work  of  the  world  and  the  search  for 
ultimate  truth. 

Such  is  the  method  of  science  and  true  philosophy, 
ancient  and  modern.  And  Mrs.  Wharton  is  about 
as  little  of  a  scientist  as  she  is  a,  humorist  or  a  Stoic. 

There  is  another  side  to  the  book  in  the  epigram 
matic  echoes  of  life  in  that  section  of  the  "  Smart 

0 

Set  "  where  Lily  Bart  found  herself  most  at  home. 
"  She  seemed  to  exist  only  as  a  hostess,  not  from 
any  exaggerated  instinct  of  hospitality,  as  because 
she  could  not  sustain  life  except  in  a  crowd."  "  It 
was  simply  inhuman  of  Pragy  to  go  off  now.  She 
says  her  sister  is  going  to  have  a  baby  ...  as  if 
that  were  anything  to  having  a  house  party."  "  As 
if  anyone  could  help  having  Carry  Fisher !  It  was 
foolish  of  her  to  get  that  second  divorce.  .  .  .  Carry 
always  overdoes  things  .  .  .  but  she  said  the  only 
way  to  get  a  penny  out  of  Fisher  was  to  divorce 
him  and  make  him  pay  alimony,  and  poor  Carry  has 
to  consider  every  penny !  "  "  Have  you  noticed 
how  all  the  husbands  like  her?  All,  I  mean,  except 
her  own  ?  "  "  You  mean  she'd  shock  him  and  he'd 
bore  her.  Well,  that's  not  such  a  bad  beginning 
you  know  .  .  .  and  as  for  getting  what  she  wants 
in  the  long  run,  commend  me  to  the  nasty  woman." 
There  are  other  comments,  more  searching,  on 
human  weakness  and  human  inconsistency.  "  No 
insect  hangs  its  nest  on  so  frail  a  thread  as  those 
that  will  sustain  the  weight  of  human  vanity,  and  the 
sense  of  being  of  importance  even  among  the  insig 
nificant  was  enough  to  restore  to  Miss  Bart  the 
gratifying  consciousness  of  power."  "  The  civilized 


EDITH  WHARTON  367 

instinct  finds  a  subtler  pleasure  in  making  use  of  an 
antagonist  than  of  confounding  him."  "  He  en 
joyed  spectacular  effects  and  was  not  insensible  to 
the  part  that  money  plays  in  their  protection;  all 
he  asked  was  that  the  very  rich  should  live  up  to 
their  calling  as  stage  managers,  and  not  spend  their 
money  in  a  dull  way."  "  She  liked  their  elegance, 
their  lightness,  their  lack  of  emphasis,  even  the  self- 
assurance  which  at  times  was  so  like  obtuseness,  now 
seemed  the  sign  of  social  ascendency.  .  .  .  Already 
she  felt  allegiance  to  their  standards,  acceptance  of 
their  limitations,  a  disbelief  in  the  things  they  did 
not  believe  in,  a  contemptuous  pity  for  the  people 
who  were  not  able  to  live  as  they  lived.  .  .  .  That 
very  afternoon  they  had  seemed  full  of  brilliant 
qualities,  now  she  saw  that  they  were  merely  dull  in 
a  bad  way." 

So  much  the  intrusion  of  her  own  sordid  experi 
ences,  and  the  fact  that  she  finds  nowhere  outside 
her  own  family  a  friend  to  whom  to  turn,  has  begun 
to  teach  Lily  Bart. 

Again  we  are  informed :  "  Don't  you  think  .  .  . 
that  the  people  who  find  fault  with  society  are  apt 
to  regard  it  as  an  end  —  not  as  a  means,  just  as 
the  people  who  despise  money  feel  as  if  its  only  use 
was  to  be  kept  in  bags  and  gloated  over.  Isn't  it 
fairer  to  look  at  them  both  as  opportunities  which 
may  be  used  stupidly  or  intelligently  according  to 
the  capacity  of  the  user?  .  .  .  The  queer  thing 
about  society  is  that  the  people  who  regard  it  as 
an  end  are  those  who  are  in  it,  and  not  the  critics 
on  the  fence.  It's  just  the  other  way  with  most 
shows  .  .  .  the  audience  may  be  under  the  illusion, 


368     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

but  the  actors  know  that  real  life  is  on  the  other  side 
of  the  footlights.  The  people  who  take  society  as 
an  escape  from  work  are  putting  it  to  its  proper 
use." 

Again  Mrs.  Wharton  tells  us :  "I  don't  underrate 
the  decorative  side  of  life.  It  seems  to  me  the  sense 
of  splendor  has  justified  itself  by  what  it  has  produced. 
The  worst  of  it  is  that  so  much  human  nature  is 
used  up  in  the  process  ...  a  society  like  ours 
wastes  such  good  material  in  producing  its  little 
patch  of  purple.  .  .  .  Why  do  we  call  our  generous 
ideas  illusions  and  our  mean  ones  truths?  Isn't  it 
a  sufficient  condemnation  of  society  to  find  one's  self 
accepting  such  phraseology?  " 

Mrs.  Wharton  does  not  take  any  particular 
trouble  to  show  that  the  illusions  of  society  in  and 
near  New  York  nowadays  are  commercialized  ones. 
She  feels  that  they  are  inartistic,  she  realizes  that 
good  material  is  wasted  in  their  production,  she 
seems  concerned  more  with  the  inadequacy  of  the  re 
sults  than  with  the  waste  of  the  material  itself.  She 
has  a  social  color  sense  sufficient  to  produce  her  own 
broad  chromatic  effects  of  literary  composition.  She 
does  not  revel  in  the  gold  that  drips  color  abroad, 
as  Henry  James  does ;  she  does  not  take  society  in 
its  restricted  sense  as  seriously  as  he  does ;  her  epi 
grams  are  sufficiently  corrosive  to  eat  through  the 
veneer  at  times;  her  cynicism  is  less  self-centered. 

At  the  same  time  her  criticism  of  society  and  of 
life  at  large  is  destructive  rather  than  constructive  — 
her  talent  lies  in  color  rather  than  in  form.  To 
read  her  is  to  destroy  one's  illusions,  to  learn  much 
of  the  artificiality,  the  meannesses  and  weaknesses  of 


EDITH  WHARTON  369 

life.  She  flays  the  skin  from  it,  but  she  fails  to 
anatomize  or  articulate  the  nerves  and  muscles,  the 
skeleton  and  the  vital  processes  below;  or  to  give 
us  anything  to  substitute  for  the  world  as  it  seems 
on  the  surface,  except  one  of  her  own  elaborately  pre 
pared  and  composed  canvases. 

And  in  consequence  we  have  comparatively  little 
patience  or  sympathy  with  Lily  Bart  as  she  flounders 
deeper  and  deeper  down  towards  the  submerged  tenth. 
We  are  inclined  to  think  her  a  fool  —  and  her  cousin 
Gerty  Farrish,  who  is  also  in  love  with  Selden,  an 
other  for  making  the  sacrifices  that  she  does  make, 
and  for  putting  up  with  Lily  as  long  as  she  does. 

Finally  Lily  takes  herself  off,  attempts  to  learn 
millinery  and  fails  as  she  has  failed  at  everything 
else.  She  finds  an  over-night  refuge  from  the  storm 
she  has  invoked,  at  the  home  of  a  working  girl  she 
had  formerly  befriended  at  her  cousin's  club  for 
working  girls. 

Nettie  Struthers  had  started  to  go  wrong.  Now 
she  is  married  happily  and  the  proud  possessor  of 
a  four  months'  baby.  Her  heart  overflows  with  good 
will  for  all  the  world,  and  she  tells  Lily :  "  Wouldn't 
it  be*  too  lovely  for  anything  if  she  could  grow  up 
to  be  just  like  you?  Of  course  I  know  she  never 
could  —  but  mothers  are  always  dreaming  the  crazi 
est  things  for  their  children." 

Lily  has  managed  to  wreck  her  health  together 
with  the  rest  of  her  chances  by  this  time.  She  drifts 
out  into  the  storm  again.  Selden  has  evidently 
failed  her  as  she  has  failed  him.  "  As  she  looked 
back  she  saw  that  there  had  never  been  a  time  when 
she  had  any  real  relation  to  life.  .  .  .  She  herself 


370     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

had  grown  up  without  any  one  spot  on  earth  being 
dearer  to  her  than  another;  there  was  no  center  of 
early  pieties,  a  grave,  enduring  tradition  to  which  her 
heart  could  revert  and  from  which  it  could  draw 
strength  for  itself  and  tenderness  for  others.  In 
whatever  form  the  past  lives  in  the  blood  .  .  . 
whether  in  the  concrete  image  of  the  old  house  stored 
with  visual  memories,  or  in  the  conception  of  the 
house  not  made  with  hands  but  made  up  of  inherited 
passions  and  loyalties  ...  it  has  the  same  power 
of  broadening  and  deepening  the  individual  existence, 
of  attaching  it  by  mysterious  links  of  human  kin 
ship  to  all  the  mighty  sum  of  human  striving." 

We  are  told  with  Mrs.  Wharton's  broad  artistic 
discursiveness  and  with  something  that  is  fairly  close 
to  a  fatal  facility,  that  "  such  a  vision  of  the  solidar 
ity  of  human  life  had  never  come  to  Lily  ...  all 
the  men  and  women  she  ever  knew  were  like  atoms 
whirling  away  from  each  other  in  some  wild  centrifu 
gal  dance." 

We  may  admit  in  the  vernacular  of  the  hour  that 
Mrs.  Wharton  certainly  can  write.  We  may  be  in 
clined  to  imagine,  even  while  she  is  laying  herself 
out  on  the  final  tableaux  where  Lily  lies  dead  from 
an  overdose  of  chloral,  after  she  has  received  a  leg 
acy  that  enables  her  to  pay  off  her  debt  to  Trenor 
or  to  start  life  afresh  outside  of  New  York  —  while 
Selden  kneels  beside  her  in  agonized  recognition  of 
the  results  of  his  own  lack  of  faith  —  that  while  Mrs. 
Wharton  can  write  impressively  in  passing  about 
houses  not  made  with  hands  and  inherited  passions 
and  loyalties,  her  own  ability  to  see  and  to  feel 
what  English  and  American  literature  has  been 


EDITH  WHARTON  371 

working  towards  for  centuries  is  almost  as  incom 
plete  and  ineffective  in  its  way  as  was  Lily  Bart's 
feeling  for  home  and  home  ties. 

None  the  less  The  House  of  Mirth  like  other  works 
of  art  —  more  often  met  with  to-day  on  canvas  than 
in  print  —  where  essential  truth  is  sacrificed  to  tech 
nique  and  the  nice  proprieties  of  artistic  composition, 
is  a  triumph  in  its  way. 

It  also  contains  a  very  plain  and  matter  of  fact 
moral  for  those  who  are  not  inclined  to  shy  at  so 
serious  a  thing  as  a  moral  for  practical  use.  Mrs. 
Wharton  tries  to  dramatize  Selden's  inability  to  love 
Lily  as  we  are  supposed  to  imagine  Lily  ought  to 
have  been  loved.  She  says  towards  the  last  that  a 
man's  faith  as  well  as  a  woman's  was  needed  to  pre 
vent  the  girl  from  slipping  over  the  edge  of  the 
abyss. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  there  was  nothing  in  Lily  — 
nothing  true,  essential  or  lasting,  for  a  man's  faith 
to  take  hold  of.  She  is  a  product  of  artificiality  and 
false  conventions  from  first  to  last ;  of  a  false  ideal 
of  family  and  social  life  to  begin  with;  of  an  educa 
tion  as  artificial  as  the  rest  of  her ;  of  machine-made 
Bridge  debts ;  of  overcapitalized  stock  exchange 
transactions ;  of  artificial  social  values  in  circles  where 
"  women  are  asked  as  much  for  their  clothes  as  for 
themselves  " ;  of  false  emotions  and  self-pities  partly 
induced  by  the  use  of  drugs ;  of  false  loyalty  to  the 
letter  of  the  law  of  honor,  long  since  disregarded  in 
spirit  —  down  to  the  very  moment  when,  in  a  last  de 
spairing  effort  to  set  herself  right  with  life,  she 
sends  back  Trenor's  money  to  him  and  takes  the 
poison. 


372     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Always  she  elects  the  easiest  way.  Never  once 
does  she  turn  successfully  to  face  herself  squarely; 
and  the  whole  tendency  of  the  book,  however  well  it 
displays  Mrs.  Wharton's  talents  in  other  directions, 
is  to  foster  falsely  sentimental  pity  for  Lily  Bart  as 
the  unfortunate  representative  of  a  special  interest 
and  a  special  class.  If  the  true  test  of  immorality 
is  destruction  of  power,  then  The  House  of  Mirth 
is  one  of  the  most  insidiously  immoral  novels  ever 
written. 

ii. 

In  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree  Mrs.  Wharton  has 
evidently  a  bigger  and  a  broader  aim.  Mr.  Sedg- 
wick  tells  us  that  she  has  here  endeavored  to  indicate 
the  relations  between  the  individual  and  fate.  He 
I  remarks :  "  The  serious  purpose  of  the  novel  has 
carried  Mrs.  Wharton  away  from  her  old  epigram 
matic  habit,  from  her  purple  patches  of  satirical  de 
scription  ;  it  is  only  occasionally,  as  in  the  picture  of 
Mr.  Halford  Gaines,  that  one  recognizes  her  former 
careless  flippant  brilliancy.  ...  It  is  much  less 
charming  than  The  Valley  of  Decision,  much  less  bril 
liant  than  The  House  of  Mirth  .  .  .  but  this  book 
discloses  a  far  more  serious  purpose  of  confronting 
and  grappling  life  as  it  is." 

Mrs.  Wharton  begins  by  confronting  labor  and 
capital  at  Hanaford,  a  Connecticut  factory  town 
where  Bessy  Westmore,  the  young  widow  of  a  mil 
lionaire  owner  of  the  Westmore  cotton  mills,  is 
brought  face  to  face  with  John  Amherst,  the  assistant 
manager  of  the  mills,  through  the  intervention  of 
chance  and  the  unexpected  illness  of  the  manager 


EDITH  WHARTON  373 

during  one  of  Mrs.  Westmore's  rare  visits  to  her 
chief  source  of  income. 

Amherst's  sympathies  are  all  with  the  workers, 
though  he  is  a  gentleman,  conventionally,  by  birth 
and  breeding.  "  He  felt  the  menace  of  industrial 
conditions  when  viewed  collectively,  their  poignancy 
when  studied  in  the  individual  lives  of  the  toilers 
among  which  his  lot  was  cast;  and  clearly  as  he  saw 
the  need  of  a  philosophic  survey  of  the  question,  he 
was  sure  that  only  through  sympathy  with  its  per 
sonal,  human  side  wrould  a  solution  be  reached.  The 
disappearance  of  the  old  familiar  contact  between 
master  and  man  seemed  to  him  to  be  one  of  the  great 
wrongs  of  the  industrial  situation." 

This  phase  of  the  question  has  not  occurred  to 
Bessy  Westmore  before.  She  has  been  an  absentee 
landlord  or  the  wife  of  one,  ever  since  her  marriage. 
She  arrives  in  Westmore  shortly  after  an  accident 
to  an  operative  caused  by  the  crowding,  for  commer 
cial  purposes,  of  machines  and  men  in  a  restricted 
floor  space.  Amherst  manages  to  make  her  see,  in 
spite  of  objections  raised  by  the  lawyer  who  has 
charge  of  her  affairs  and  the  authorities  at  the  town 
hospital,  that  the  operative  will  probably  lose  his  arm 
through  no  fault  of  his  own;  and  that  he  and  his 
wife,  who  has  become  consumptive  as  the  result  of 
work  in  an  atmosphere  choked  with  lint  and  dust, 
have  no  one  but  her  to  look  to  for  compensation  or 
a  chance  to  live. 

Bessy's  sympathies  are  enlisted  for  them  and  for 
Amherst's  less  expensive  plans  for  the  amelioration 
of  the  workers  and  the  outward  beautifying  of  the 
factory  village. 


374     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

We  learn  that  "  Bessy  Westmore  had  in  full 
measure  that  gift  of  unconscious  hypocrisy  which 
enables  a  woman  to  make  the  man  in  whom  she  is 
interested  believe  that  she  enters  into  all  his  thoughts. 
She  had  —  more  than  this  —  the  gift  of  self-decep 
tion  ;  supreme  happiness  of  the  unreflecting  nature, 
whereby  she  was  able  to  believe  herself  solely  en 
grossed  in  the  subjects  they  discussed,  to  regard  him 
as  the  mere  spokesman  of  important  ideas.  ...  So 
in  obedience  to  the  ancient  sorcery  of  life,  two  groped 
for  and  found  each  other." 

At  the  beginning  of  the  second  book  they  have 
been  married  for  more  than  two  years,  and  Justine 
Brent  who  was  a  volunteer  nurse  at  the  Hanaford 
hospital  when  Dillon  lost  his  arm,  becomes  an  im 
portant  factor  in  the  situation.  Justine  is  young 
and  handsome,  socially  of  a  better  class  than  her  oc 
cupation  seems  to  suggest,  intellectually  Amherst's 
equal,  and  temperamentally  fitted  to  sympathize  with 
his  partial  success  in  remaking  the  mills  and  the  lives 
of  the  operatives,  as  well  as  with  the  obstacles 
thrown  in  his  way  by  his  wife's  lawyer,  her  relatives 
and  that  side  of  Bessy's  personality  which  resents  the 
curtailment  of  her  private  income  and  the  expensive 
pleasures  of  the  Long  Island  country  house  set,  to 
which  she  belongs  by  marriage  and  by  predilection. 

After  the  death  of  Justine's  mother,  "  she  thought 
that  she  had  chosen  her  work  as  a  nurse  in  a  spirit 
of  high  disinterestedness ;  but  in  the  first  hours  of 
her  bereavement  it  seemed  as  though  only  the  per 
sonal  aim  had  sustained  her.  For  a  while  after  this 
her  sick  people  became  to  her  mere  bundles  of  disin 
tegrating  matter.  .  ,  .  Gradually  her  sound  nature 


EDITH  WHARTON  375 

passed  out  of  this  morbid  phase,  and  she  took  up  her 
task  .  .  .  glad  to  do  her  part  in  the  vast  imper 
sonal  labor  of  curing  the  world's  misery,  but  longing 
for  a  special  load  to  lift,  a  single  hand  to  clasp." 

She  meets  Amherst  and  his  wife  at  a  garden  party. 
Presently  it  appears  that  Bessy  needs  rest  and  free 
dom  from  care.  She  has  given  up  a  trip  to  Europe 
and  countermanded  an  order  for  a  new  motor  after 
a  certain  amount  of  struggle  with  Amherst  and  her 
self,  in  order  to  facilitate  his  improvements  at  the 
mills.  She  goes  to  the  Adirondacks  and  takes  Jus 
tine  with  her  to  brace  her  up  and  to  help  look  after 
Cecily,  her  daughter  by  her  first  marriage. 

Justine  comes  back  with  her  to  the  big  house  at 
Lynbrook  and  assumes  the  duties  of  an  official  host 
ess.  Bessy,  it  appears,  like  other  spoiled  children 
of  the  world,  "  combined  great  zeal  in  the  pursuit 
of  sport  —  a  tireless  passion  for  the  saddle,  the  golf- 
course  and  the  tennis  court  —  with  an  almost  oriental 
inertia  within  doors,  an  indolence  of  body  and  brain 
that  made  her  shrink  from  the  active  obligations  of 
hospitality,  though  she  had  grown  to  depend  more 
and  more  on  the  distractions  of  a  crowded  house." 

Justine  does  not  disguise  her  position  in  the  house 
hold.  She  has  no  mind  to  be  "  taken  for  one  of  the 
nomadic  damsels  who  form  the  camp-followers  of 
the  great  army  of  pleasure."  She  is  "  sensitive  to  the 
finer  graces  of  luxurious  living,  to  the  warm  lights 
on  old  pictures  and  bronzes,  the  soft  mingling  of  tints 
in  faded  rugs  and  panelings  of  time-worn  oak." 
She  does  not  find  many  of  the  finer  graces  of  mind 
and  spirit  among  "  people  whose  chief  business  it  was 
to  look  well  and  to  take  life  lightly.  ...  It  seemed 


S76     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

to  her  that  they  missed  the  poetry  of  their  situation, 
transacting  their  pleasures  with  the  dreary  method 
and  shortness  of  view  of  a  race  tethered  to  the  ledger. 
Even  the  verbal  flexibility  which  made  her  feel  that 
she  was  in  a  world  of  freer  ideas,  soon  revealed  itself 
as  a  flight  from  them,  in  which  the  race  was  distinctly 
to  the  swift ;  .  .  .  the  deadening  influence  of  the  life 
at  Lynbrook  roused  her  to  greater  intensity,  as  a 
suffocated  person  will  suddenly  develop  abnormal 
strength  in  the  struggle  for  air." 

None  the  less  she  stays  on  there.  Bessy  and  the 
child  need  her.  Bessy  had  been  at  the  same  convent 
in  Paris  with  her,  and  as  Bessy's  relations  with  her 
husband  and  the  eternal  squabbles  with  the  lawyers 
over  money  and  mill  improvements  become  more  acute, 
she  perceives  that  Amherst  needs  her  too. 

Finally  Amherst  finds  his  plans  checkmated  and 
his  position  in  the  house  rendered  intolerable  through 
friction  over  neighbors  of  theirs  whose  divorce  court 
record  he  cannot  and  will  not  countenance.  He  is 
offered  a  position  as  manager  of  a  big  cotton  mill  in 
the  South  and  arranges  to  go.  Justine  meets  him  in 
New  York  at  the  last  moment  and  prevails  on  him  to 
make  one  more  appeal  to  his  wife.  He  starts  for 
Lynbrook,  telephones  that  he  is  coming,  arrives,  finds 
that  his  wife  has  received  his  message  and  has  chosen 
that  moment  to  go  off  to  the  house  of  the  divorce 
court  heroine  aforesaid.  Thereupon  he  starts  for 
the  South  forthwith. 

Some  time  after  this  Justine  writes  to  him,  telling 
him  that  he  ought  to  come  back.  Bessy  is  present 
when  his  reply  arrives.  Justine  shows  it  to  her. 
Bessy  approves  neither  of  certain  references  to  her, 


EDITH  WHARTON  377 

nor  of  Justine's  terms  of  apparent  intimacy  with  her 
husband.  She  has  her  wildest  hunter  saddled  and 
rides  out  alone  on  a  winter  day  when  the  roads  are 
covered  with  ice. 

She  is  brought  back  with  a  broken  spine.  Spe 
cialists  and  nurses  are  summoned.  Amherst,  who 
has  started  for  South  America  to  investigate  cotton- 
growing  conditions  there,  and  her  father  who  is  in 
Egypt,  are  sent  for.  Justine  takes  her  turn  at  the 
nursing.  Bessy  is  barely  kept  alive  for  nearly  a 
month.  The  specialist  in  charge  of  the  case  admits 
that  there  is  practically  no  hope.  A  young  local 
practitioner  by  the  name  of  Wyant  thinks  otherwise ; 
sees  a  lifetime's  opportunity  of  making  a  reputation 
for  himself  and  almost  succeeds.  The  effect  of  the 
anaesthetics  begins  to  wear  off.  Justine  revolts  at 
what  seems  to  her  needless  prolongation  of  suffering. 
And  finally,  when  she  is  left  alone  with  Bessy  to  ad 
minister  hypodermic  injections,  puts  an  end  to  the 
latter's  life. 

A  will  is  found,  made  six  months  before  Mrs.  Am- 
herst's  death,  in  which  her  property  is  divided  between 
her  husband  and  her  daughter.  Amherst  holds  Ce 
cily's  share  in  trust  and  has  enough  of  the  mill  stock 
himself  to  retain  a  controlling  interest ;  in  the  course 
of  time  he  makes  the  mills  pay  and  at  the  same  time 
yield  equitable  returns  to  the  operatives  as  well  as  to 
the  stockholders.  Justine  goes  abroad  for  six  months 
with  a  patient  who  has  nervous  prostration.  On  her 
return  she  is  engaged  as  nursery  governess  for  Cecily 
by  the  child's  grandfather,  Mr.  Langhope. 

In  less  than  two  years  after  Bessy's  death  she  is 
married  to  Amherst.  She  keeps  the  exact  cause  of  his 


378      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

first  wife's  death  secret.  She  shares  her  husband's 
work  and  his  plans,  his  tastes  and  intellectual  sym 
pathies.  After  a  time  they  begin  to  feel  that  their 
happiness  is  too  great  to  last. 

Here  fate  is  made  to  intervene  in  the  person  of 
Wyant,  who  has  become  a  morphine  fiend  and  who  has 
never  been  in  doubt  as  to  the  precise  cause  of  Bessy's 
taking  off.  Justine  pays  him  blackmail  for  some 
time,  partly  for  the  sake  of  his  wife  and  child.  Fin 
ally  she  rebels  when  he  insists  on  his  appointment  to 
an  important  position  in  a  New  York  hospital.  Am- 
herst  comes  in  in  the  course  of  their  dispute  and  the 
truth  comes  out. 

He  disposes  of  Wyant  finally,  and  gradually  be 
gins  to  suspect  that  Justine  may  have  been  tempted 
to  murder  Bessy  through  motives  of  self-interest. 
Justine  comprehends  this  and  insists  that  the  truth 
shall  be  told  to  Mr.  Langhope.  She  gets  to  him 
first  and  arranges  to  banish  herself  to  Michigan, 
where  she  has  done  nursing  before,  on  condition  that 
the  matter  shall  go  no  further.  Mr.  Langhope  con 
sents  and  Justine  disappears. 

Amherst  makes  no  effort  to  find  her  at  first. 
Gradually  he  begins  to  feel  that  he  has  misjudged 
her.  Cecily  becomes  ill  and  wants  Justine.  Mr. 
Langhope  finally  consents  that  she  shall  be  sent  for. 
Amherst  and  Justine  are  reconciled  and  the  book 
closes,  two  months  after  Mr.  Langhope's  death,  with 
the  opening  of  a  people's  pleasure  palace  at  Hana- 
ford  dedicated  to  the  first  Mrs.  Amherst. 

Mrs.  Wharton  has  injected  a  characteristic  touch 
of  sub-acid  cynicism  into  her  description  of  the  final 
tableau,  by  reminding  the  reader  of  the  plans  which 


EDITH  WHARTON  379 

Bessy  had  hurriedly  caused  to  be  drawn  for  a  pleas 
ure  palace  of  her  own  at  Lynbrook,  with  squash 
court,  gymnasium,  bowling  alley,  marble  swimming 
tank,  marble  fountain  and  elaborate  terraces ;  and 
which  had  as  hurriedly  caused  to  be  abandoned  dur 
ing  Amherst's  stay  in  the  South.  Amherst  finds 
them  when  he  finds  the  will  and  supposes  that  he  is 
carrying  out  his  wife's  last  wishes  in  diverting  them 
to  their  use  at  Hanaford.  He  begins  to  idealize  this 
side  of  Bessy's  nature,  and  Justine  sees  that  here  is 
one  secret  that  she  can  never  tell,  that  she  must  al 
ways  keep  from  him.  "  It  was  now  at  last  that  she 
was  paying  her  full  price." 

We  may  agree  with  Miss  Hawthorne  that  the  great 
fault  of  the  book  is  its  lifelessness,  that  the  back 
ground  of  workers  at  the  mills  is  never  a  living, 
breathing  reality,  though  we  may  not  go  so  far  as 
to  say  that  the  impression  produced  is  more  farcical 
than  moving.  It  is  neither  one  nor  the  other.  It  is 
an  ineffectual,  barely  scholarly  exposition  of  certain 
phases  of  the  labor  problem  as  it  appears  to  minds 
like  Mrs.  Wharton's.  It  is  neither  sound  sociologi 
cal  truth,  human  aspiration  and  inspiration,  or  ade 
quate  realistic  fiction  as  Zola's  Germinal  and  Arnold 
Bennett's  Claylianger  are. 

This  first  section  of  the  book  serves  as  little  more 
than  a  prologue  to  the  actual  working  out  of  Mrs. 
Wharton's  plot,  in  a  setting  no  more  congenial  to  the 
author  herself  than  to  the  majority  of  the  people  she 
writes  about  and  for.  Concerning  the  majority  of 
the  persons  pictured  in  the  prologue,  Miss  Hawthorne 
is  quite  right  when  she  tells  us  that  they  are  little 
more  than  silhouettes  painted  on  a  screen. 


380      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

She  goes  on  to  say :  "  The  actual  characters  of 
the  story  are  put  before  us  with  a  finesse  and  surety 
that  is  delightful  in  the  effect  of  art.  You  have  no 
slightest  affection  for  any  of  them ;  but  you  do  have 
a  keen  interest  in  observing  the  thoroughly  capable 
manner  in  which  they  are  handled.  .  .  .  The  book 
seems,  indeed,  to  be  written  largely  to  exploit  this 
power.  .  .  .  The  great  sob  and  struggle  of  the  up 
ward  movement  of  the  world,  now  beginning  to  beat 
almost  terribly  against  our  consciousness,  finds  no 
least  echo  in  the  pages  of  this  book  that  is  yet  sup 
posedly  built  upon  it." 

The  very  fact  that  the  book  is  built  upon  the  sob 
and  struggle  of  the  world  provides  an  echo  of  a  sort. 
When  Miss  Hawthorne  goes  so  far  as  to  say  that 
while  Henry  James  "  concerns  himself  solely  with  the 
spiritual  processes,  the  inner  life  of  his  characters, 
Mrs.  Whar  ton's  probe  reaches  no  further  than  to  the 
idiosyncrasies  and  little  outward  manifestations  that 
differentiate  man  from  man,"  we  have  only  to  con 
trast  the  characters  of  Bessy  and  Justine  at  their 
first  interview  after  Amherst  has  left  his  wife. 

"  '  Thanks  for  your  advice.  It  would  be  excellent 
but  for  one  thing  —  my  husband  is  not  coming  back ! ' 
.  .  .  *  Bessy !  What  do  you  mean  by  not  coming 
back?' 

"  '  I  mean  he's  had  the  tact  to  see  that  we  shall  be 
more  comfortable  apart  —  without  putting  me  to  the 
unpleasant  necessity  of  telling  him  so.' 

"  Again  the  piteous  echo  of  Blanche  Carbury's 
phrases !  The  labored  mimicry  of  her  ideas ! 

"  Justine    looked    anxiously    at    her    friend.   .  .   . 


EDITH  WHARTON  381 

'  Please    tell   me   what   has   happened,'    she   said   at 
length.     Bessy,  with  a  smile,  released  her  hand. 
"  '  John  has  gone  back  to  the  life  that  he  prefers 

—  which  I  take  to  be  a  hint  to  me  to  do  the  same.' 

"  Justine  hesitated  again ;  then  the  pressure  of 
truth  overcame  every  barrier  of  expediency.  '  Bessy 

—  I  ought  to  tell  you  that  I  saw  Mr.  Amherst  in  town 
the  day  I  went  to  Philadelphia.     He  spoke  of  going 
away  for  a  time  —  he  seemed  unhappy  —  but  he  told 
me  that  he  was  coming  back  to  you  first  — '     She 
broke  off,  her  clear  eyes  on  her  friend's ;  and  she  saw 
that  Bessy  was  too  self-engrossed  to  feel  any  surprise 
at  her  avowal.     '  Surely  he  came  back  ?  '  she  went  on. 

"  '  Oh,  yes  —  he  came  back,'  Bessy  sank  into  the 
cushions  watching  the  firelight  play  on  her  diamond 
chain  as  she  repeated  a  restless  gesture  of  lifting  it 
up  and  letting  it  slip  through  her  fingers. 

"'Well  — and  then?' 

"  '  Then  —  nothing !  I  was  not  here  when  he 
came.' 

"  '  You  were  not  here  ?     What  had  happened  ?  ' 

"  '  I  had  gone  over  to  Blanche  Carbury's  for  a  day 
or  two.  I  was  just  leaving  when  I  heard  he  was 
coming  back,  and  I  couldn't  throw  her  over  at  the 
last  moment.' 

"  Justine  tried  to  catch  the  glance  that  flittered 
evasively  over  Bessy's  lashes.  '  You  knew  he  was 
coming  and  you  chose  that  time  to  go  to  Mrs.  Car 
bury's  ?  ' 

"'I  didn't  choose,  my  dear  —  it  just  happened! 
And  it  really  happened  for  the  best.  I  suppose  he 
was  annoyed  at  my  going  —  you  know  he  has  a  ridic- 


382      LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ulous  prejudice  against  Blanche  —  and  so  the  next 
morning  he  rushed  off  to  his  cotton  mill  .  .  .' 

"  At  length  Justine  said,  '  Did  Mr.  Amherst  know 
that  you  knew  he  was  coming  back  before  you  left 
for  Mrs.  Carbury's?  ' 

"  Bessy  feigned  to  meditate  the  question.  '  Did 
he  know  that  I  knew  that  he  knew  ?  '  she  mocked. 
'  Yes,  I  suppose  so  —  he  must  have  known.'  She 
stifled  a  slight  yawn  as  she  rose  languidly  to  her 
feet. 

"  '  Then  he  took  that  as  your  answer?  ' 

"  4  My  answer  — ! ' 

"  <  To  his  coming  back?  ' 

"  '  So  it  appears.  I  told  you  that  he  had  shown 
unusual  tact.' 

"  Bessie  stretched  her  softly  tapering  arms  above 
her  head  and  then  dropped  them  along  her  sides  with 
another  yawn.  '  But  it's  almost  morning  —  it's 
wicked  of  me  to  have  kept  you  so  late,  when  you  must 
be  up  to  look  after  all  these  people.' 

"  She  flung  her  arms  with  a  light  gesture  on  Jus 
tine's  shoulders  and  laid  a  dry  kiss  on  her  cheek. 

"  '  Don't  look  at  me  with  those  big  eyes  —  they've 
eaten  up  the  whole  of  your  face!  And  you  needn't 
think  I'm  sorry  for  what  I've  done,'  she  declared. 
'  I'm  not  —  the  —  least  —  little  —  atom  —  of  a 
bit.'  " 

Something  more  than  "  mere  outward  manifesta 
tions  "  seem  to  be  delineated  here. 

It  is  quite  possible  that  Mrs.  Wharton  knows  more 
about  what  she  is  doing  than  her  critic  does ;  that  she 
defines  Bessy's  character  fairly  clearly  as  a  by-prod 
uct  and  part  of  the  unearned  increment  of  her  own 


EDITH  WHARTON  383 

social  class;  that  it  becomes  expedient  that  one  woman 
shall  die  for  the  people;  that  the  evil  which  Bessy 
and  her  kind  do,  chiefly  through  their  inability  to  do 
good,  lives  after  them  and  becomes  an  obligation,  a 
problem,  an  obstacle,  and  a  final  means  of  grace  for 
the  finer  and  stronger  spirits  who  survive  them. 

All  this  Mrs.  Wharton  has  managed  to  indicate  in 
her  own  peculiarly  composed  and  artistic  way.  She 
is  in  no  more  danger  of  rubbing  in  the  moral  unduly 
at  any  time  than  she  is  in  danger  of  losing  her  liter 
ary  poise  through  any  temporary  rush  of  strong 
feeling  to  her  pen.  The  book  does  continue  to  take 
the  ex  cathedra  attitude  of  most  of  Mrs.  Wharton's 
former  work.  Many  of  the  characters  are  compara 
tively  lifelike,  very  few  of  them  tangibly  lovable. 
Justine  Brent  may  be  noted  as  a  partial  exception. 
She  is  finely  conceived  and  admirably  portrayed  — 
up  to  a  certain  point.  Beyond  that  she  remains  elu 
sive  like  the  rest,  though  she  becomes  almost  human, 
or  seems  about  to  become  so,  when  she  starts  off  on 
her  self-imposed  exile. 

Here  Mrs.  Wharton  misses  another  chance,  as  she 
did  in  The  House  of  Mirth,  of  narrowing  and  in 
tensifying  the  interest,  of  focussing  it  on  some  sick 
bed  or  some  small  village  center  in  Michigan,  and  of 
making  Justine  tangibly  real  to  herself  and  to  the 
reader.  This  Mrs.  Wharton  did  not  do.  Such  an 
episode  evidently  would  not  suit  the  epic  proportions 
of  the  theme  announced  in  her  title  and  crowded  into 
the  last  hundred  pages  of  a  long  book :  the  story  of 
the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil  shared  by  a  man  and 
his  wife  who  win  their  lost  Paradise  back  again, 
partly  by  the  interposition  of  chance  and  partly 


384     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

through  sheer  hard  and  fast  determination  to  believe 
that  it  belonged  to  them. 

Altogether  the  book,  though  hardly  more  human 
than  The  House  of  Mirth,  is  in  some  respects  more 
divine,  and  even  inspiring  intellectually,  at  the  close. 

Technically  it  has  many  of  the  faults  of  its  prede 
cessor.  Some  of  them  are  sufficiently  exemplified  in 
the  sections  already  quoted.  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree 
also  has  excellencies  of  its  own.  We  get  a  little  more 
of  the  world  of  nature. 

These  restricted  vistas  are  apt  to  be  carefully  com 
posed  colored  etchings  in  a  minor  key.  Like  her  in 
terior  scenes,  they  have  the  sense  of  being  posed  for 
—  now  and  again  they  are  very  perfect  in  their  way. 

"  As  Amherst  looked  to  where  she  pointed,  the 
squirrel  leapt  to  another  tree,  and  they  stole  on  after 
him  through  the  hushed  wood,  guided  by  his  gray 
flashes  in  the  dimness.  Here  and  there  in  a  break 
of  the  snow  they  trod  on  a  bed  of  wet  leaves  that  gave 
out  a  breath  of  hidden  life,  or  a  hemlock  twig  dashed 
its  spicy  scent  in  their  faces.  As  they  grew  used  to 
the  twilight  their  eyes  began  to  distinguish  countless 
delicate  gradations  of  tint :  cold  mottlings  of  gray- 
black  boles  against  the  snow,  wet  russets  of  drifted 
beech  leaves,  a  distant  network  of  mauve  twigs  melt 
ing  into  the  woodland  haze.  And  in  the  silence  just 
such  fine  gradations  of  sound  became  audible ;  the  soft 
drop  of  loosened  snow  lumps,  a  stir  of  startled  wings, 
the  creak  of  a  dead  branch,  somewhere  far  off  in  the 
darkness." 

It  is  eminently  suitable  for  Mrs.  Wharton's  pur 
poses  that  Amherst  and  Bessy  should  decide  to  get 
married  in  such  a  setting.  The  intellectual  or 


EDITH  WHARTON  385 

vaguely  aesthetic  appeal  remains  predominant  in  her 
outdoor  views  as  well  as  in  her  no  less  carefully  com 
posed  interiors. 

Children,  like  animals  and  inanimate  nature,  Mrs. 
Wharton  has  little  use  for  as  literary  material,  save 
as  links  in  her  plots  or  carefully  modulated  details 
in  her  backgrounds  and  middle  distances. 

Like  the  women  of  the  class  that  she  celebrates  most 
in  the  majority  of  her  novels,  and  in  more  than  one  of 
her  short  stories  and  novelettes,  the  most  lasting  im 
pression  that  we  get  from  Mrs.  Wharton  is  that  she 
cares  comparatively  little  for  anything  but  the  im 
pression  she  is  trying  for  the  moment  to  produce. 
This  was  obvious  to  Mr.  Sedgwick  and  to  the  average 
reader  in  her  earlier  work. 

In  her  more  recent  writings  she  has  done  little  to 
reassure  us  that  her  development  as  a  personality 
has  equaled  or  transcended  the  growth  of  her  facility 
as  a  writer.  Many  of  her  more  recent  short  stories 
are  pretentiously  commonplace.  This  is  especially 
true  of  the  collection  headed  by  The  Hermit  and  the 
Wild  Woman,  1908. 

Crucial  Instances,  1906,  shows  a  certain  advance 
over  The  Great  Inclination  and  a  promise  which 
has  not  been  incontestably  fulfilled  by  any  book  of 
short  stories  published  since  then.  The  Descent  of 
Man,  1904,  in  spite  of  masterpieces  in  little  like  its 
title  story,  The  Mission  of  Jane  and  The  Other  Two, 
contains  much  comparatively  inferior  work. 

In  these  books  and  in  The  Hermit  and  the  Wild 
Woman,  1908,  and  Tales  of  Men  and  Ghosts, 
1910,  there  is  frequently  noticeable  a  distinct  rever 
sion  to  the  less  admirable  manner,  method,  point  of 


386     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

view,  and  stylistic  barrenness  and  infelicity  of  Mr. 
James  in  his  last  and  worst  period. 

Mrs.  Wharton's  style  never  becomes  as  involved 
and  willfully  perverted  as  that  of  Mr.  James  at  his 
worst.  It  does,  however,  lapse  frequently  in  her 
short  stories  to  the  inconsequences  and  unsubstanti 
ated  pretentiousness  of  the  following  paragraphs: 
"  The  Fenno  furniture,  however,  presented  to  such 
reasoning  the  obtuseness  of  its  black  walnut  cham- 
ferings ;  and  something  in  its  attitude  suggested  that 
its  owners  would  be  as  uncompromising.  The  room 
showed  none  of  the  modern  attempts  at  palliation,  no 
apologetic  drapings  of  facts ;  and  Mrs.  Quentin,  pro 
visionally  perched  on  a  green-reps  Gothic  sofa  with 
which  it  was  clearly  impossible  to  establish  any  closer 
relation,  concluded  that,  had  Mrs.  Fenno  needed  an 
other  seat  of  the  same  size,  she  would  have  set  out 
placidly  to  match  the  one  on  which  her  visitor  now 
languished. 

"  .  .  .  If  she  were  such  an  abyss  of  insincerity  as 
to  dissemble  distrust  under  such  frankness,  she  must 
at  least  be  more  subtle  than  to  bring  her  doubts  to 
her  rival  for  solution.  The  situation  seemed  to  be 
one  through  which  one  could  no  longer  move  in  a 
penumbra,  and  he  let  in  a  burst  of  light  with  the 
direct  inquiry :  '  Won't  you  explain  what  you 
mean?"5 

The  average  reader,  when  he  cares  for  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton  at  all,  has  a  right  to  demand,  "  Won't  you  explain 
what  you  mean,  in  fewer  words  and  with  less  rhetor 
ical  picturing  " —  if  in  these  particular  passages  and 
others  like  them  you  have  anything  at  all  to  say  that 
is  really  worth  the  saying? 


EDITH  WHARTON  387 

Put  to  the  acid  test  of  the  most  searching  verbal 
and  harmonic  criticism,  they  appear  as  nothing  less 
than  flaws  in  her  work  that  give  us  good  reason  to 
doubt  her  initial  and  final  sincerity  both  as  literary 
craftsman  and  interpreter  of  life.  When,  as  in  the 
former  instance,  such  passages  disfigure  a  story  like 
The  Quicksand,  which  on  the  whole  is  very  well 
worth  reading,  their  presence  is  additionally  de 
plorable. 

The  second  paragraph  was  quoted  equally  at  ran 
dom  from  The  Dilettante,  whose  title  is  sufficiently 
symptomatic  of  everything  Mrs.  Wharton  has  done 
or  tried  to  do  in  prose  since  The  Fruit  of  the  Tree. 

In  the  best  of  her  novelettes  Mrs.  Wharton  has  ap 
plied  more  conscientiously  the  principle  of  the  econ 
omy  of  means.  In  Madame  de  Treymes,  1907, 
which  Mr.  Winter  thinks  the  most  perfect  in  form 
and  sympathy  with  the  characters  delineated  of  any 
of  her  works,  we  have  an  admirable  pendant  to  the 
Madame  de  Mauves  of  Mr.  James.  Had  priority 
of  time  in  this  instance  been  on  the  side  of  Mrs.  Whar 
ton,  the  ranking  might  easily  have  been  reversed. 

In  Sanctuary,  1903,  we  have  an  equally  admira 
ble  and  lucid  statement  of  a  somewhat  academic  moral 
problem,  which  displays  prettily  the  author's  versa 
tile  capacity  to  stretch  a  short  story  out  into  novel 
ette  length  —  and  very  little  more  of  original  or  last 
ing  value. 

In  Ethan  Frome,  1911,  she  has  invaded  the  Mid- 
Victorian  New  England  territory  of  Mary  E.  Wil- 
kins  Freeman  and  Sophie  Orne  Jewett,  borrowed  both 
authors'  phraseology  and  imperfectly  photographic 
rendering  of  New  England  country  life,  and,  on  the 


388     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

whole,  done  wonderfully  well  with  what  she  has  found 
in  her  new  field. 

There  is  this  distinction  to  be  noted,  however. 
Mrs.  Freeman  and  Miss  Jewett  both  depict  New  Eng 
land  life  at  first  hand,  in  terms  redolent  of  the  soil, 
as  a  direct  outgrowth  of  environment. 

Mrs.  Wharton  has  obviously  constructed  a  priori 
the  formula  of  her  attempt  to  parallel  a  Greek  trag 
edy  in  a  more  somber  setting,  where  the  plot  mechan 
ism  focusses  rather  farcically  around  the  misadven 
tures  of  a  broken  glass  pickle  dish ;  and  she  has  ar 
ranged  suitable  local  color  and  stage  setting  to  cor 
respond,  in  accordance  with  her  inveterate  tendency 
to  compose. 

After  the  manner  of  Mr.  James,  she  has  started 
the  story  in  the  mouth  of  an  elderly  man  of  scholarly 
tastes  who  appears  transiently  on  the  scene ;  but  in 
spite  of  these  handicaps  of  temperament  and  method 
she  has  achieved  what  on  the  whole,  and  taken  by  it 
self,  might  easily  be  ranked  as  a  notable  minor 
achievement  of  .the  school  of  fiction  best  represented 
in  America  to-day  by  Margaret  Deland  and  Alice 
Brown.  Concerning  The  Reef,  1912,  no  less  a  critic 
than  Mr.  J.  B.  Kerfoot  has  briefly  suggested,  in  a 
recent  number  of  Life,  that  Mrs.  Wharton,  after  a 
period  of  comparative  submergence,  has  emerged,  or 
is  about  to  emerge,  on  a  higher  literary  level  than 
that  reached  by  The  House  of  Mirth.  This  sugges 
tion  indicates  a  point  of  view  in  the  critic,  with  re 
gard  to  literature  and  life  at  large,  that  seems  at 
times  to  come  perilously  close  to  Mrs.  Wharton's 
own.  In  the  tabloid  book  review  referred  to,  Mr. 


EDITH  WHARTON  389 

Kerfoot  has  done  even  less  than  the  novelist  to  prove 
his  point. 

Taken  in  connection  with  the  rest  of  her  work,  these 
last  two  books  afford  something  like  final  proof  of 
something  like  a  fatal  facility,  undisciplined  and  of 
comparatively  little  use  to  its  possessor  or  anyone  else, 
save  as  a  minor  commercial  asset  to  the  author  and  to 
the  magazine  and  publishing  house  with  which  she  has 
been  from  the  first  identified. 

That  this  versatility  rises  at  times  to  something 
like  talent  of  the  first  rank,  we  have  abundant  proof 
of  in  a  single  book  of  verse,  Artemis  to  Actceon,  1909, 
in  which  half  a  dozen  or  more  poems  in  Browning's 
manner  are  readily  comparable  to  Browning  at  far 
from  his  worst. 

That  it  falls  frequently  intolerably  below  Mrs. 
Wharton's  earlier  and  more  brilliant  excellence  needs 
no  explicit  and  detailed  proof  here  and  now. 

We  may  not  agree  with  Mr.  Sedgwick  when  he 
suggests  that  there  never  has  been  a  time  when  so 
much  fiction  has  been  written  at  so  high  a  level  as  to 
day  ;  but  there  is  abundant  room  for  his  further  con 
tention  :  "  In  the  open  competition  for  fame  differ 
ent  novelists  have  borne  off  different  prizes ;  one  has 
secured  the  praise  of  subtlety,  another  of  solidity, 
others  of  poetic  feeling,  insight  or  profundity;  but 
who  that  is  writing  to-day  can  dispute  with  Mrs. 
Wharton  the  term  brilliancy  ?  " 

There  are  very  few  novelists  in  America  to-day, 
doing  first-rate  work  or  anything  like  it,  that  would 
care  to  dispute  the  term  brilliancy  with  her.  Bril 
liancy  is  a  patrician  quality,  of  the  superficial,  by  the 


390     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

superficial,  for  the  superficial.  It  is  intrinsically 
alien  to  the  genius  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  world,  in  par 
ticular  to  that  of  its  male  half;  and  the  great 
mass  of  the  world  in  general  has  some  reason  for  look 
ing  at  it  with  suspicion. 

In  sporadic  instances,  by  spurts  and  by  dashes, 
Mrs.  Wharton,  like  the  class  of  which  she  is  so  strik 
ing  an  example,  suggests  something  better  than  bril 
liancy,  begins  to  realize  it,  rises  and  subsides, 
achieves,  and  fails  to  repeat. 

In  this  failure  to  make  good  repeatedly,  to  get 
down  to  some  solid  working  basis,  to  devote  her  un 
doubted  talents  to  some  lasting  and  disciplined  serv 
ice  to  herself  and  to  the  rest  of  the  world,  she  remains 
highly  typical  of  the  type  and  the  more  selfishly  en 
lightened  section  of  Twentieth  Century  American 
plutocracy  that  she  so  ably  interprets  and  repre 
sents. 


IX 

MRS.   ATHERTON  AND  ANCESTRY 

"Distinction  is  the  consequence,  never  the  object  of  a  great 
mind."  Washington  Allston. 

"  Washington  is  a  crude,  unwieldy  village,  New  York  is  one 
of  those  nightmares  a  certain  class  of  writers  project  and 
label  'earth  in  the  year  2000.'  Chicago  is  the  entrails  of 
the  universe.  The  small  interior  towns  and  villages  of  the 
Eastern  states  are  open  mausoleums  for  people  so  old  and 
dried  up  that  their  end  should  be  not  death  but  dessication. 
Some  of  the  cities  of  the  South  .  .  .  have  backgrounds  of  a 
sort,  but  they  are  as  lifeless  as  their  negroes.  The  cities  of 
the  West  are  hives,  and  when  you  have  seen  one  you  have 
seen  all.  Its  smaller  communities  are  horrors  pure  and  sim- 
pie." 

MRS.  ATHERTON  puts  these  words  into  the  mouth 
of  an  Englishman,  the  hero  of  Ancestors,  1907,  who 
has  seen  much  of  Europe  and  the  British  Empire, 
and  who  has  played  a  leading  part  in  English  politics 
before  he  visits  America  for  the  first  time.  The  sen 
timents  seem  to  be  her  own.  In  one  way  or  another 
she  has  given  us  to  understand,  at  considerable  length, 
that  she  hasn't  much  use  for  America,  as  she  finds  it 
to-day,  with  the  possible  exception  of  San  Francisco 
and  the  territory  tributary  thereto. 

As  an  evolutionary  product  of  California  and  of 
the  feminist  school  of  fiction,  she  deserves  a  certain 
amount  of  serious  consideration  that  her  personality 
and  her  writings,  taken  by  themselves,  hardly  seem  to 
justify.  Few  can  or  will  dispute  with  her  the  title 

of  our  leading  lady  novelist,  for  Edith  Wharton  is 

391 


392     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

in  many  ways  in  a  class  by  herself  —  certainly  not 
in  that  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  or  her  leading  rivals. 
Among  those  it  would  be  perhaps  unfair  to  specify 
Elinor  Glyn  as  typical,  or  as  crowding  her  American 
leader  closely  in  the  race  for  the  production  of  hu 
man  documents  of  the  distinctively  modern  and  fem 
inist  type. 

On  the  whole,  one  may  call  Mrs.  Atherton  ultra- 
patrician  rather  than  ultra-feminine  and  come  within 
speaking  distance  of  the  truth. 

In  the  book  mentioned  above,  she  tells  us  that  Eng 
land  is  the  apex  of  the  world's  civilization  to-day. 
She  also  tells  us  that  Americans  have  no  tempera 
ment  ;  that  "  the  man  who  is  not  a  gentleman  when 
he  is  drunk  has  no  right  to  be  alive  at  all  " ;  that 
"  the  man  whom  champagne  transforms  into  a  big, 
silly  boy  is  the  right  sort."  Whether  this  is  what  she 
means  by  temperament  is  doubtful,  as  the  culprit  in 
this  case  is  a  San  Francisco  capitalist  of  German- 
American  extraction.  Less  doubtful  is  her  tendency 
to  create  an  interest  of  a  sort  in  aristocratic  vice,  pa 
trician  variants  of  the  "  eternal  triangle,"  and  tem 
peramental  affinities  on  a  more  expansive  and  artistic 
sense  —  in  Tower  of  Ivory,  Ancestors,  American 
Wives  and  English  Husbands,  and  The  Conqueror 
notably. 

More  doubtful  is  her  own  claim,  and  that  of  her  pet 
characters  and  her  pet  city,  to  intellectual  distinc 
tion.  She  is  rather  inclined  to  make  light  of  San 
Francisco's  pretensions  to  Bohemianism  brilliancy  in 
art,  literature  and  the  joy  of  life.  At  the  same  time, 
she  appears  to  be  secretly  proud  of  it  and  of  her 
appreciation  of  it  —  as  of  most  things,  tempera- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  393 

mental,  exotic  artistically,  intellectually  fashionable, 
patrician  and  expensive,  that  come  within  the  color 
scheme  of  her  own  impressionistic  canvases. 

Evidently  she  prides  herself  on  being  an  impres 
sionist  of  the  impressionists,  a  modern  of  the  mod 
erns,  a  Californian  of  the  Californians.  And  like 
most  of  the  less  subtle  artists  in  this  school,  her  aim 
for  distinction  is  obvious ;  her  capacity  for  striking 
wrong  notes  and  mixing  high  lights  and  shadows  that 
shriek  at  each  other  on  the  same  square  inch  of  sur 
face,  infinite.  Her  facility  for  using  the  wrong  word 
has  been  sufficiently  commented  upon.  The  result, 
at  her  happiest  moments,  is  disconcerting  and  dis 
enchanting;  at  her  worst,  simply  ludicrous  or  un 
speakably  banal. 

All  this  is  not  to  say  that  at  times  she  is  not  worth 
study,  more  for  what  she  evidently  tries  to  do  than 
for  what  she  rarely  succeeds  in  doing.  Frequently 
she  is  essentially  readable  to  minds  of  a  certain  type. 
To  others  she  serves  for  diversion  unconsciously. 
And  we  may  suppose  she  is  looked  up  to  with  some 
thing  like  awe  as  the  feminine  prose  laureate  of  the 
chambermaids,  manicures,  shopgirls,  chorus  girls, 
climbers,  actresses,  nouwaux  riches,  maids  and  mis 
tresses  both,  of  empty  minds  and  anaemic  morals,  who 
form  so  large  a  fraction  of  her  reading  public. 

She  gives  this  sort  of  people  the  thing  they  want, 
the  thing  they  are  looking  for,  the  thing  they  would 
and  do  sell  their  souls  and  bodies  to  get,  in  more  con 
crete  and  tangible  form  than  that  of  the  printed 
page.  Her  reward  is  great  in  dollars  and  cents, 
shillings  and  pounds  sterling,  and  her  fame  propor 
tionate,  In  all  this  she  is  typically  modern,  tern- 


394     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

peramental,  commercialized,  twentieth  century  Amer 
ican  up  to  date,  like  a  great  part  of  the  island  and 
the  city  that  she  extols. 

Dr.  F.  T.  Cooper,  in  a  brief  study  of  her  in  Some 
American  Story  Tellers,  borrows  a  phrase  from  a 
severe  criticism  of  her  work  in  the  London  Saturday 
Review  some  years  before,  and  says :  "  She  has  an 
uncommonly  broad  outlook  upon  life,  and  side  by  side 
with  this  ...  a  persistent  rebellion  against  the 
bondages  of  the  literary  schools  ...  in  short,  a  riot 
ous  freedom  of  style  and  construction  that  is  not  un 
fairly  stigmatized  as  intellectual  anarchy." 

Whether  Mrs.  Atherton  is  better  or  worse  equipped 
for  anarchy  in  the  realm  of  the  intellect  than  the 
whole  mob  of  writers  of  all  sorts  and  both  sexes  whose 
claim  to  consideration  in  literature  and  out  of  it  may 
be  roughly  classed  as  exotic  and  extravagant  — 
whether  Mr.  H.  O.  Sedgwick  for  one  would  rightly 
consider  her  as  typical  of  "  the  mob  spirit  in  litera 
ture  " —  is  beside  the  point. 

Dr.  Cooper  considers  her  a  force  in  American  fic 
tion  of  the  present  day.  She  evidently  considers  her 
self  such,  and  acts  accordingly. 

In  his  essay  on  Mr.  Howells,  already  quoted,  Pro 
fessor  Phelps  tells  us :  "  Every  now  and  then  there 
has  arisen  a  violent  revolt  against  his  leadership,  the 
latest  outspoken  attack  coming  from  a  novelist  of 
distinction,  Gertrude  Atherton.  In  the  year  1907 
she  relieved  her  mind  by  declaring  that  Mr.  Howells 
has  been  and  is  a  writer  for  boarding  school  misses, 
that  he  has  never  penetrated  deeply  into  life,  and  not 
only  has  his  own  timidity  prevented  him  from  cour 
ageously  revealing  the  hearts  of  men  and  women,  but 


MRS.  ATHERTON  395 

that  his  position  of  power  and  influence  has  cast  a 
blight  on  American  fiction.  Thanks  to  him,  she  in 
sists,  American  novels  are  pale  and  colorless  produc 
tions  and  are  known  the  world  over  for  their  tameness 
and  insipidity." 

There  is  a  great  deal  to  be  said  from  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton's  point  of  view  about  the  blight  cast  on  American 
fiction  by  men  and  women  of  the  type  that  Mr.  How- 
ells  prominently  exemplifies;  about  the  intellectual 
and  moral  tameness  of  most  of  their  books,  and  about 
the  influence,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  exerted 
by  editors,  sub-editors,  publishers,  publishers'  read 
ers,  critics,  librarians,  unprofessional  readers  of  lit 
erature  for  boarding  school  misses  or  New  England 
spinsters,  and  people  with  their  ears  to  the  ground 
for  commercialized  reasons  obvious  to  all.  The  fact 
remains  that  Mrs.  Atherton  has,  neither  in  her  own 
work  nor  through  any  notable  disciples  or  followers  of 
herself,  succeeded  so  far  in  providing  us  with  any  ulti 
mate  antidote  for  the  vagaries  of  the  New  England 
conscience  between  covers;  and  that,  in  the  modern 
world  in  the  making,  she  may  be  regarded  (like  the 
type  of  woman  that  she  represents)  rather  as  a  by 
product  than  a  force. 

This  product,  such  as  we  find  it  to-day  in  New 
York  and  elsewhere,  is  still  sufficiently  crude,  unfor- 
mulated,  unevolved,  restless,  insatiable,  extravagant, 
generally  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium,  so  far 
and  so  often,  as  to  make  present  analysis  uncertain, 
and  prophecies  as  to  its  future  variants  equally  un 
reliable  and  unprofitable. 

One  never  knows  what  Mrs.  Atherton  is  going  to 
do  next  because,  apparently,  she  never  knows  herself. 


396     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Dr.  Cooper  tells  us  that  her  novels  are  faulty  in  lit 
erary  construction  because  she  does  not  choose  to  fol 
low  the  rules  as  he  chooses  to  interpret  them.  This 
reminds  one  of  a  man  who  takes  a  woman  seriously 
(and  this  the  man  in  question  appears  to  do  in  this 
particular  case) ,  and  then  complains  because  his  logic 
is  not  her  logic,  his  reasoning  not  her  reasoning: 
her  method  and  conclusions  are  often  very  far  from 
being  his. 

Frequently  Mrs.  Atherton  does  deserve  to  be  taken 
seriously  by  the  most  serious  of  critics,  though,  as  a 
literary  artist,  she  is  quite  as  often  illuminating 
through  her  misses  as  through  her  hits.  Any  woman 
who  has  the  courage  of  her  convictions  and  who  man 
ages  to  publish  them  through  the  medium  of  the  mod 
ern  prose,  that  seeks  and  finds  the  line  of  least  resist 
ance,  as  successfully  as  this  woman  does,  is  very  likely 
to  challenge  our  attention  sooner  or  later.  She  may 
or  may  not  win  our  sympathies  to  any  vast  extent ; 
she  may  bore  us  or  amuse  us,  involuntarily,  at  times ; 
at  her  best  she  deserves  to  be  noticed  —  as  far  as  she 
herself  can  be  interpreted  as  characteristic  of  any 
thing  more  than  a  desire  shared  by  her  with  many 
other  women,  ancient  and  modern,  "  to  draw  strength 
out  of  the  universe  "  and  to  use  it  for  ends  and  in 
ways  that  seem  sufficient  to  herself. 

Briefly,  Mrs.  Atherton,  in  common  with  many 
Calif ornians  and  other  Americans  more  or  less  favored 
by  nature,  worships  success  with  the  patrician  hall 
mark  of  heredity  and  recognized  achievement  plain 
ly  stamped  on  it.  The  theory  that  every  American 
girl  is  born  a  queen  in  her  own  right  does  not  ap 
peal  to  her  sans  restriction,  but  she  is  a  living  ex- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  397 

emplification  of  some  of  the  best  and  the  worst  fea 
tures  of  the  tradition  on  which  that  theory  is  based. 

She  is  perfectly  willing  to  take  advantage  of  the 
soi-disant  aristocrat's  assumed  privilege  of  lectur 
ing  the  lower  orders  whenever  she  sees  fit.  She 
makes  it  evident  that  she  admires  Alexander  Hamil 
ton,  a  contemporary  English  politician  or  two  born 
in  the  purple,  the  late  Crown  Prince  of  Austria,  and 
the  War  Lord  of  Germany  intensely.  She  admires 
the  privileges  and  powers  that  they  found  ready  to 
hand;  still  more  those  they  took  and  kept  for  them 
selves.  She  assumes  that  the  spiritual  privilege 
of  heredity,  the  nice  regard  for  honor,  truth,  loyalty 
and  chivalry  (so  far  as  chivalry  is  convenient  if  close 
to  a  throne),  are  the  special  interests  of  the  few,  not 
of  the  many.  She  tells  us  that  the  only  true  demo 
crat  is  an  aristocrat  at  heart.  At  the  same  time  she 
asserts  that  monarchy  in  Europe  is  effete  and  out 
worn,  and  permitted  to  survive  only  by  the  will  of  the 
people.  She  manifests  a  supercilious  and  patrician 
disdain  for  the  impurities  of  American  politics,  for 
machine  rule,  and  the  bourgeois  intrusion  of  the 
common  people,  who  have  made  our  politics  a  mere 
matter  of  trade,  of  buying  and  selling  wholesale  in 
the  open  market.  And  on  this  assumption,  she  en 
deavors  to  persuade  herself  and  others  that  she  is 
a  better  American  and  truer  democrat  than  the  rest 
of  us. 

Doubtless  she  has  some  grounds  for  belief  in  the 
creed  that  she  professes  to  follow.  So  has  the  War 
Lord  for  his.  He  might  subscribe  as  readily  as  we 
can  to  this  extract  from  The  California^,  1898: 
"  Men  and  women  were  allowed  to  develop  into  speak- 


398     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ing,  reasoning,  generally  intelligent  beings  for  one 
purpose  only :  to  make  the  world  better  not  worse,  as 
the  best  of  men  strive  more  or  less  constantly  toward 
an  ideal  (and  the  second  best  strive  sometimes)  which, 
if  realized,  would  make  this  world  a  very  different 
place.  ...  If  it  could  be  pounded  into  every  woman's 
head  that  she  was  a  fool  to  think  twice  about  every 
man  she  could  not  marry,  and  that  she  threatened  the 
whole  social  structure  every  time  she  brought  a 
fatherless  child  into  the  world  .  .  .  every  time  she 
deliberately  violated  her  own  instinct  for  good  .  .  . 
we'd  all  begin  to  develop  into  what  the  Almighty  in 
tended  to  be  when  He  started  us  off  on  our  long 
march." 

It  is  doubtful  if  the  Kaiser  would  subscribe  to  the 
whole  of  this :  "  If  you  can't  get  the  very  best  in 
this  world,  take  nothing.  That  is  the  only  religion 
for  a  woman  to  cling  to,  and  if  she  does  cling  to  it 
she  can  do  without  any  other."  He  might  to  this : 
"  The  new  country  is  full  of  good  impulses  with  little 
to  bind  them  together.  The  American  press  is  an 
exemplification  of  this  absence  of  noblesse  oblige,  and 
more  particularly  in  its  treatment  of  women.  Even 
when  not  moved  by  personal  jealousy  or  spite,  the 
total  lack  of  respect  with  which  the  American  press 
treats  women  who  have  not  in  any  way  challenged 
public  opinion  —  society  women  with  whom  the  pub 
lic  has  no  concern,  women  upon  whom  either  the  mis 
fortune  of  circumstances  or  of  a  powerful  individual 
ity  has  fallen  ...  is  the  most  significant  fore 
boding  of  the  degeneration  of  a  national  character 
while  yet  half  grown. 

"  Fifty  years  ago  when  the  United  States  was  still 


MRS.  ATHERTON  399 

so  old  fashioned  as  to  be  hardly  '  American,'  it  was 
more  or  less  bound  together  by  the  conventions  it  had 
inherited  from  the  great  civilizations  that  begat  it. 
These  conventions  exist  to-day  only  in  the  men  of 
the  highest  breeding,  those  with  six  or  eight  genera 
tions  behind  them  of  refinement,  consequence,  and 
fastidiousness  of  association.  In  these  men,  the  rep 
resentatives  of  an  aristocracy  that  is  in  danger  of 
being  crippled  and  perhaps  swamped  by  plutocracy, 
exists  the  convention  which  forces  the  most  deplorable 
degenerate  of  old-world  aristocracy  to  manifest  him 
self  a  gentleman  at  every  crucial  test.  So  thorough 
ly  did  Trennahan  comprehend  these  facts,  so  pro 
found  was  his  contempt  for  the  second-rate  men  of 
his  country,  that  he  was  almost  self-conscious  about 
his  honor.  He  would  no  more  have  asked  Magdalena 
to  release  him,  nor  have  adopted  the  still  more  con 
temptible  method  of  forcing  her  to  break  her  engage 
ment,  than  he  would  have  been  the  ruin  of  an  inno 
cent  girl." 

Around  this  particular  patrician  prejudice  and 
scruple  Mrs.  Atherton  has  written  a  book  of  more 
than  three  hundred  pages,  which,  like  most  of  her 
earlier  efforts,  is  comparatively  slight  in  method  and 
unambitious  in  bulk. 

Magdalena  Yorba,  half  New  England,  half  Span 
ish  by  birth,  heiress  and  intimate  of  the  old  Spanish 
aristocracy  of  San  Francisco's  Nob  hill  and  the  pa 
trician  and  suburban  exclusiveness  of  Menlo  Park, 
is  neither  born  beautiful,  nor  does  she  achieve  beauty 
or  has  it  thrust  upon  her  after  the  manner  of  our 
more  modern  beauty  parlor,  man-modiste  or  society 
column  advertising  methods. 


400     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Life  in  Menlo  Park  is  comparatively  primitive  in 
the  days  of  which  Mrs.  Atherton  writes.  Perhaps 
that  is  what  makes  it  attractive  to  "  a  Mr.  Trenna 
han  of  New  York,"  a  retired  diplomat  with  a  past 
and  a  rich  man  who  has  come  West  for  diversion  of 
one  sort  or  another. 

He  finds  it  in  Magdalena  who  has  emancipated 
herself  from  all  belief  in  the  hereafter  via  a  life  mem 
bership  in  the  Commercial  Library,  which  she  values 
as  her  most  precious  earthly  possession,  and  the  writ 
ings  of  Darwin  and  Spencer,  and  who  is  determined 
to  make  the  most  of  the  one  life  left  to  her  by  the 
product  of  her  pen  —  preferably  by  historical  fic 
tion  of  the  age  of  Cromwell  to  begin  with. 

Interest  in  fiction  languishes  after  the  arrival  of 
Trennahan,  who  convinces  himself  in  the  course  of  a 
morning  ride  or  two  that  the  time  has  come  to  settle 
down,  and  that  Menlo  Park  is  the  place  in  which  to 
settle.  Later  he  falls  desperately  in  love  with  Helena 
Belmont,  reigning  belle  of  San  Francisco  and  Mag- 
dalena's  dearest  friend  and  childhood's  playmate. 
Helena  reciprocates,  as  her  friend  has  done. 

Magdalena  overhears  Trennahan's  attempt  to 
break  things  off  with  Helena  and  overrules  it.  Later 
Helena  breaks  her  own  engagement  because  she  finds 
herself  temperamentally  incapable  of  marrying  a 
rake,  however  reformed,  and  Trennahan  starts  to 
travel. 

In  the  meantime  Magdalena  discovers  Henry 
James,  meets  him  in  the  flesh,  bows  down  to  him  in 
the  spirit,  and  decides  that  hereafter  literature  holds 
out  no  possibilities  or  rewards  for  her.  About  the 
same  time  her  father  shows  signs  of  developing  into 


MRS.  ATHERTON  401 

a  miser  and  a  monomaniac.  As  his  symptoms  be 
come  more  acute,  Trennahan  returns,  and  they  are 
married  in  haste  just  before  the  old  Don  succeeds  in 
hanging  himself  in  an  American  flag  that  has  long 
hung  in  his  room. 

This  is  one  of  a  series  of  books  that  Dr.  Cooper 
finds  time  to  praise:  that  he  considers  more  or  less 
in  detail.  He  suggests  that  their  symbolism  is  often 
obscure  or  awkwardly  handled,  and  he  tells  us : 

"  No  one  can  read  her  books  without  being  aware 
of  the  keen  interest  she  has  taken  in  the  spread  of 
the  modern  democratic  movement.  .  .  .  Still  more 
keenly  is  she  concerned  with  the  inevitable  con 
flict  all  the  time  going  on  between  this  younger, 
stronger  democratic  movement  and  the  inherent  prej 
udices  of  an  older  aristocratic  conservatism.  .  .  . 
She  has  chosen  again  and  again  with  many  minor  va 
riations  to  study  the  struggle  of  a  young  woman 
striving  to  readjust  herself  to  the  new  order  of  things, 
trying  to  conquer  heredity,  to  put  aside  the  conven 
tions  on  which  she  has  been  nurtured  and  to  live  her 
own  life." 

Patience  Sparhawk,  1895,  is  a  case  in  point.  Pa 
tience,  who  is  temperamentally  very  far  from  patient, 
hails  from  California,  goes  East  to  be  educated,  mar 
ries  in  haste  into  a  New  York  family  of  Plutocrats 
with  patrician  pretensions,  and  very  soon  wishes  she 
hadn't.  It  seems  that  "  her  ideals  of  life  were  ac 
cumulated  largely  from  the  novels  of  Mr.  Howells 
and  Mr.  James  " ;  and  the  reaction  after  she  has  seen 
all  she  cares  to  of  New  York  is  something  awful. 

She  decides  that  the  New  York  women  are  the 
most  insolent  she  has  ever  met.  She  decides  that 


402     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Jesus  Christ  does  not  satisfy  the  intellectual  needs 
of  the  nineteenth  century  .  .  .  that  "  civilization 
needs  a  new  prophet  and  he  must  be  an  anarchist, 
one  who  will  teach  the  government  of  self  by  self, 
the  government  of  man's  nature  by  the  will,  which 
is  in  turn  subservient  to  the  far-seeing  brain." 

She  tries  a  little  intellectual  anarchy  herself  on  a 
suburban  gathering  of  women  religiously  inclined. 
"  And  yet  you,  atoms,  pygmies,  individual  manifesta 
tions  of  a  great  correlative  force  called  human  will, 
you  presume  to  address  this  stupendous  Being,  and 
stand  up  and  kneel  down  and  talk  to  it,  to  imagine 
that  it  listens  to  your  insignificant  wants.  .  .  . 
It  is  for  you  to  develop  that  force-character  and  rely 
upon  it,  not  upon  a  spiritual  lover  as  weak  women  do 
upon  some  unfortunate  man.  What  good  does  all 
this  religious  sentimentality  do  you?  Your  brains 
are  rotting.  You  have  nothing  to  talk  about  to  in 
telligent  men.  No  wonder  the  men  of  small  towns 
get  away  as  soon  as  they  can  and  seek  the  intelligent 
women  of  lower  strata." 

Patience  is  evidently  not  the  long  suit  of  this  par 
ticular  Patience,  nor  of  her  creator,  whose  moral  and 
emotional  mouthpiece  she  is. 

She  says :  "  Men  are  naturally  brighter  than 
women,  and  girls  of  your  sort  deliberately  make  your 
selves  as  limited  and  colorless  as  you  can.  .  .  . 
Make  yourselves  companions  of  men  if  you  would 
make  the  world  better.  .  .  .  Study  the  subjects 
that  interest  them  .  .  .  study  politics  and  the 
great  questions  of  the  day  that  you  may  lead  them 
to  the  higher  ethical  plane  on  which  nature  has  placed 
you."  Mrs.  Atherton  does  not  show  us  conclusively 


MRS.  ATHERTON  403 

here  or  elsewhere  that  women  are  really  on  a  higher 
ethical  plane  than  men,  or  that  she  really  believes 
them  to  be. 

She  does  say,  however :  "  One  thing  is  positive,  I 
think.  We  must  adjust  our  individual  lives  without 
reference  to  the  problems  of  the  moment.  Woman- 
ism,  Socialism,  the  Political  Question,  the  Marriage 
Questions,  and  all  the  others  that  are  everlastingly 
raging.  .  .  .  Moreover,  however  much  she  may  rea 
son,  nothing  can  eradicate  the  strongest  instinct 
in  woman  .  .  .  that  she  can  find  happiness  only 
through  some  man." 

She  tells  us  that  women  make  too  much  fuss. 
If  they  don't  like  their  life  why  don't  they  alter  it 
quietly.  (This  is  worth  bearing  in  mind  in  connec 
tion  with  Julia  France.}  Without  taking  to  the 
lecture  platform  or  polemical  novel?  They  can  do 
anything  with  the  plastic  mind.  I  am  sure  it  can 
be  proved  that  most  corrupt  politicians,  and  bad 
husbands  had  weak  or  careless  mothers.  If  the  men 
of  a  country  are  bad,  you  can  be  sure  that  the  wom 
en  are  worse. 

Naturally,  with  such  outspoken  sentiments,  Pa 
tience  is  popular  neither  with  her  degenerate  multi 
millionaire  husband,  nor  with  the  rest  of  his  family. 
She  makes  other  enemies  as  well.  She  runs  away 
from  home  when  too  much  pressure  is  put  on  her, 
and  goes  to  work  on  a  big  New  York  newspaper. 
She  finds  the  life  fascinating,  though  she  has  to  work 
hard.  She  finds  some  of  the  men  she  meets  profes 
sionally  still  more  so. 

She  has  this  to  say  of  them :  "  This  is  the  young 
man's  epoch  .  .  .  think  of  the  men  under  thirty  that 


404     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

are  editors  and  authors  and  special  writers.  They 
are  burnt  out  at  forty,  but  they  begin  to  play  a 
brilliant  part  in  their  early  twenties.  .  .  .  They  are 
certainly  distinguished  for  conceit.  .  .  .  When  you 
get  used  to  newspaper  men  you'll  like  them  better 
than  any  men  you've  known.  .  .  .  It's  true  that  they 
have  no  respect  for  anybody  or  anything.  They  be 
lieve  in  no  woman's  virtue  and  no  man's  honesty  under 
stress.  .  .  .  No  men  know  so  well  how  to  enjoy  life, 
know  so  thoroughly  its  resources,  or  have  all  their 
senses  so  thoroughly  developed,  particularly  their 
sense  of  humor  which  keeps  them  from  making  fools 
of  themselves." 

From  this  truly  original  book  and  human  docu 
ment,  we  glean  also  the  following  specimens  of  fem 
inine  proverbial  philosophy  —  before  we  hasten  to  its 
final  climax  and  near-tragedy :  "  Ambition  is  the  loot 
ing  of  hell  in  chase  of  biting  flames  over  a  desert  of 
ashes.  .  .  I've  known  girls  that  looked  like  marble 
statues,  the  kind  with  the  snub  nose ;  that's  our  swag 
ger  New  York  type.  .  .  .  No  man  can  feel  so  thor 
oughly  for  a  day,  and  that  after  all  is  the  philosophy 
of  life.  .  .  .  All  phases  of  feeling  are  temporary  .  .  . 
all  emotions,  all  desires,  all  fulfillment.  Life  itself  is 
temporary.  .  .  .  There  is  only  one  law  for  a  woman 
to  acknowledge  and  that  is  her  self-respect.  Sir  Gal 
ahad  is  not  my  ideal;  I  could  never  find  anything 
interesting  in  an  elongated  male  infant.  .  .  .  He 
doesn't  even  want  to  understand  her,  and  a  woman 
resents  that  as  a  personal  insult.  ...  I  should  have 
kept  your  mind  interested  and  talked  to  you  about 
yourself.  Those  are  the  secrets  of  success  in  matri 
mony.  .  .  .  Most  people  are  such  bores  after  a  little. 


MRS.  ATHERTON  405 

.  .  .  Are  all  people  good  in  the  same  way?  Well 
it  comes  to  the  same  thing  in  the  end.  .  .  .  Remember 
that  no  mistake  is  irrevocable,  there  are  as  many  to 
morrows  as  yesterdays,  that  only  the  incapable  has 
a  past.  ...  In  reality  happiness  means  a  comfort 
able  state  of  affairs  between  a  man  and  a  woman 
writh  plenty  of  brains,  philosophy  and  passion,  who 
are  wholly  congenial  in  these  three  matters  and  have 
chucked  their  illusions  overboard." 

The  last  is  the  opinion  of  a  New  York  editor  who 
comes  close  to  marrying  or  eloping  with  her.  Pa 
tience  goes  back  to  take  care  of  the  degenerate  hus 
band  when  it  appears  that  he  is  very  sick  indeed, 
and  is  in  great  need  of  the  most  devoted  nursing. 
He  dies  through  an  overdose  of  morphine.  His 
widow  is  accused  of  murder,  tried,  convicted,  brought 
to  the  electric  chair;  and  a  pardon  based  on  sup 
pressed  evidence  is  produced  at  the  last  moment  by 
the  lawyer  who  finally  succeeds  in  proving  her  inno 
cence,  and  in  marrying  her. 

There  is  an  obvious  striving  for  intense  realism 
in  the  final  scene  that  to  some  extent  defeats  itself. 
On  the  whole  the  story  is  well  told  and  more  readable 
from  cover  to  cover  than  most  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  own 
books,  or  nine  novels  out  of  ten  that  one  meets  in  cur 
rent  American  fiction  of  the  day  and  hour.  Its  pur 
pose  is  evident  in  extracts  like  the  following,  which 
has  reference  to  the  jury  by  which  the  heroine  is 
tried: 

"  The  horrible  people.  ...  It  is  humiliating  to 
think  of  being  at  the  mercy  of  men  like  that.  .  .  . 
She  had  never  seen  twelve  heads  so  little.  They 


406     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

were  hardly  an  advance  upon  their  hairy  ancestors. 
At  night  they  haunted  her.  .  .  .  What  was  the  mat 
ter  with  civilization.  ...  ?  " 

Something  of  the  same  intellectual  anarchy  is  seen 
in  The  Doomswoman  (1892):  "Granting  for  the 
sake  of  argument  that  this  existence  is  supplemented 
by  another,  you  have  no  knowledge  of  what  elements 
you  will  be  composed  of  when  you  lay  aside  your  mor 
tal  part ;  your  power  of  enjoyment  may  be  worn  very 
thin  indeed  like  the  music  of  a  band  without  brass. 
.  .  .  But  one  thing  of  earth,  we  do  know  .  .  .  we 
have  a  slight  capacity  for  happiness  and  a  large  ca 
pacity  for  enjoyment.  There  is  not  much  in  life  God 
knows,  but  there  is  something.  .  .  .  Of  that  we  are 
sure.  Of  what  comes  after  we  are  absolutely  un 
sure.  ...  I  am  neither  an  atheist  nor  a  Catholic. 
The  question  of  religion  has  no  interest  for  me  what 
ever." 

This  is  the  point  of  view  of  Don  Diego  Estinega, 
the  hero  of  a  strong  story  of  California  before  the 
American  occupation.  In  those  days,  Mrs.  Atherton 
tells  us,  the  women  of  California  were  admirable 
in  many  ways,  "  chaste,  strong  of  character,  indus 
trious,  devoted  as  mothers,  born  with  sufficient  capac 
ity  for  small  pleasures." 

Some  were  matriarchs.  Mrs.  Atherton  can  ad 
mire  that  kind  of  thing  in  the  past  of  her  native  state, 
whose  early  days  are  vividly  delineated  in  The  Splen 
did  Idle  Forties,  1902.  Concerning  this  Mr.  Cooper 
says :  "  The  Splendid  Idle  Forties  with  its  kaleido 
scopic  pictures  of  the  life  of  old  California,  a  life  al 
ready  vanishing  into  the  realm  of  forgotten  things, 
has  a  quality  that  refuses  to  be  disregarded  ...  a 


MRS.  ATHERTON  407 

quality  of  exotic  beauty.  .  .  .  Yet  the  most  that  can 
be  said  of  it  is  that  it  contains  more  of  promise  than 
of  fulfillment." 

In  both  these  books,  as  elsewhere,  wherever  she  in 
dulges  in  description  of  any  sort  besides  that  of  her 
own  mental  states  and  appreciations  more  or  less 
thinly  disguised,  there  is  a  tendency  to  revel  in  the 
crude  barbarism  of  the  obvious,  in  the  material  sur 
roundings  of  men  and  women.  Needless  to  say,  her 
heroines  —  though  for  the  time  being  they  can  be 
happy  in  rubber  boots  and  overalls  on  a  California 
chicken  ranch,  or  clad  for  the  occasion  in  an  Adiron 
dack  wilderness,  provided  some  men  are  somewhere 
in  sight  —  are  of  the  sort  that  look  best  decollete  and 
be  jeweled. 

She  tells  us  plainly  in  Rulers  of  Kings,  1904,  that 
this  is  a  sign  of  race.  She  has  as  little  use  for  the 
woman  who  can't  and  won't  look  her  best  so  panoplied, 
as  in  Ancestors  and  its  predecessors  she  has  for  mere 
domesticity  in  California  or  out  of  California  to 
day.  She  gives  us  impressionistic  glimpses  of  lux 
uriously  upholstered  interiors,  such  as  she  considers 
suitable  frames  for  her  exotic  personalities  in  Eng 
lish  country  places,  German  Schlosser,  old  Califor- 
nian  haciendas,  modern  San  Francisco  multi-million 
aire  palaces ;  but  never  once  has  she  succeeded  in 
creating  or  inspiring  the  illusion  of  a  home. 

Children,  like  other  home  products,  are  minus 
quantities  in  her  scheme  of  things.  You  never  see 
or  hear  of  them  in  her  books,  except  in  the  case  of 
The  Girl  Who  Grew  Up  by  Herself  —  her  stock  char 
acter  and  pet  puppet  —  or  its  masculine  variant  who 
develops  more  spectacularly  still  with  the  help  of 


408     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

well-trained  tutors,  at  least  one  intellectually  anar 
chistic  parent  alive  or  dead,  and  the  rest  of  the  whole 
machinery  of  patrician  fate,  into  a  conqueror  or  a 
ruler  of  kings. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  in  The  Conqueror  (1902), 
she  has  achieved  a  big  book;  though  Mr.  Cooper 
gives  her  no  credit  for  it  whatever  —  not  even  that  of 
bare  mention  in  his  resume  of  her  literary  resources 
and  achievements.  She  has  been  accused  by  many 
of  creating  a  new  type  of  prose  literature.  Human 
ity,  however,  has  been  spared  the  infliction.  Heroes 
and  Hero  Worship  was  an  old  story  long  before  Car- 
lyle  crystallized  its  salient  attributes.  To  the  more 
or  less  remote  past  that  produced  it  Mrs.  Atherton 
belongs ;  and  she  glories  in  the  fact. 

For  all  her  dippings  into  Darwinism,  hers  is  es 
sentially  an  eighteenth  century  mind,  with  the  eight 
eenth  century's  patrician's  limitations  and  intensi 
ties  ;  and  like  the  Hamilton  of  her  creation,  she  hates 
Jefferson  and  eighteenth  century  democracy  in 
America  as  intensely  as  she  would  have  hated  Carlyle 
himself  if  she  had  come  in  his  way. 

She  admits  that  the  most  striking  part  of  the  book, 
the  description  of  the  West  India  hurricane,  is  taken 
from  Hamilton's  own  written  account;  and  that  in 
all  other  essential  details  she  has  followed  his  letters 
and  the  facts  of  history  very  closely.  On  this  sub 
structure  she  has  raised  the  edifice  of  a  book  that 
will  continue  to  be  read  more  in  the  light  of  novel 
ized  biography  than  as  a  permanent  contribution  to 
the  fiction  of  its  country  or  of  its  century. 

Summed  up  in  two  words  by  the  ordinary  busy 
reader  of  Twentieth  Century  American  literature, 


MRS.  ATHERTON  409 

the  book,  like  the  character  of  Hamilton  as  she  makes 
him  out,  is  intensely  fascinating. 

Still  more  briefly,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
exact  historian  and  scientist,  and  that  of  the  exact 
ing  critic,  the  word  theatrical  covers  the  ground  ex 
actly. 

She  begins  by  saying  in  her  preface :  "  After  all, 
what  is  a  character  novel  but  a  dramatized  biogra 
phy  ?  "  She  suggests :  "  Why  not  throw  the  graces 
of  fiction  over  the  sharp  hard  facts  that  historians 
have  laboriously  gathered  ?  "  She  claims  that  she 
is  true  in  essence  to  Hamilton's  stupendous  services 
to  the  country,  and  to  his  infinite  variety.  This  seems 
to  give  her  considerable  lee-way  at  the  start.  Of 
this  she  does  not  fail  to  take  advantage  in  her  pre 
sentation  of  the  case,  both  as  a  partisan  of  aristoc 
racy  and  as  a  professed  artist  and  novelist  of  some 
thing  more  than  minor  rank. 

One  cannot  well  quarrel  with  a  woman  like  Mrs. 
Atherton  for  being  partisan  and  patrician.  That 
sort  of  thing  is  in  the  blood  and  in  the  temperament 
and  must  inevitably  color  every  page  she  writes. 
But  when  she  sets  herself  up,  in  America  to-day,  to 
be  at  once  an  historian  and  a  novelist  of  more  than 
common  pretension,  we  have  a  right  to  ask  of  her, 
whatever  her  other  qualifications  or  deficiencies,  that 
as  an  historian  she  shall  at  least  seek  truth,  even 
more  than  patriotism  as  she  sees  and  feels  it ;  and 
that  as  a  novelist  she  shall  have  comparatively  little 
use  for  the  claptrap  methods  of  pseudo-fatalism 
on  the  stage  of  life  in  general  and  of  early  nineteenth 
century  American  politics  in  particular. 

The  first  part  of  The  Conqueror  is  excellent  after 


410     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

its  order.  Of  Hamilton's  own  account  of  the  hurri 
cane  which  was  the  indirect  cause  of  his  emigration 
to  New  York,  we  may  say  as  Andrew  Lang  has  said 
of  Scott's  tournament  in  Ivanhoe-  "  No  other  hur 
ricanes  need  apply." 

In  general  the  rest  of  this  section  strikes  the  same 
high  note  of  masculine  terseness  and  intensity,  de 
scriptive  of  life  in  a  tropical  setting  where  things 
happen  rapidly  and  with  obvious  results.  Rachael 
Levine,  Hamilton's  mother  —  married  as  a  child  to  a 
brute,  later  living  in  unlegalized  wedlock  with  the 
father  of  her  infant  phenomenon  —  is  a  woman  after 
Mrs.  Ather ton's  own  heart.  Much  the  same  may 
be  said  of  her  handsome,  aristocratic,  brilliant  and 
incapable  father.  One  meets  the  same  character 
again  and  again,  often  as  the  merest  sketch  of  the 
heroine's  progenitor  in  her  other  books. 

The  minor  characters  of  the  life  in  Nevis,  St. 
Kitts  and  St.  Croix  appear  to  be  sketched  from  life, 
and  are  admirably  done. 

None  the  less,  like  Hamilton  himself,  we  are  not 
sorry  to  leave  the  islands  for  a  wider  field  of  activity. 
The  whole  action  of  the  book  up  to  the  point  of  his 
departure  for  New  York  and  King's  College,  has 
been  to  stimulate  our  interest  in  the  growing  unrest 
of  a  young  genius,  cribbed,  cabined  and  confined  in 
a  still  narrower  Corsica;  and  while  we  may  be  fairly 
well  aware  of  the  fact  that  Mrs.  Atherton  keeps  him 
on  the  center  of  the  stage  all  the  time,  and  while  we 
may  not  be  as  deeply  impressed  with  his  phenomenal 
qualities  of  fascination,  brilliancy,  industry  and  su 
preme  intellectual  capacity,  as  she  seems  to  be  her- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  411 

self,  we  naturally  want  to  see  what  she  is  going  to 
make  of  him,  or  let  him  make  of  himself. 

Hamilton  goes  to  King's  College,  now  Columbia 
University,  and  at  first  —  in  the  intensity  of  a  truly 
American  determination  to  complete  the  course  in 
record-breaking  time,  to  do  five  years'  work  in  two  — 
he  displays  the  typical  patrician  aloofness  to  the 
popular  demands  of  the  moment.  He  goes  to  Bos 
ton  on  a  vacation  trip  and  he  sees  "  men  of  iron,  not 
of  flesh  and  blood  "  in  Faneuil  Hall.  Although  he 
meets  many  of  them,  "  they  made  no  individual  im 
pression  on  him,  he  sees  them  only  as  a  mighty  brain, 
capable  of  solving  a  mighty  question  and  of  a  stern 
and  bitter  courage." 

He  goes  back  to  New  York.  He  reads  up  the 
question  according  to  the  best  authorities.  He  also 
reads  up  military  tactics.  He  has  been  inclined  to 
favor  the  principles  of  the  British  Constitution.  He 
perceives  that  the  jumping  off  place  has  arrived; 
and  he  jumps.  He  becomes  the  leader  of  the  pa 
triots  among  the  students  in  a  day.  He  makes  a 
highly  inflammatory  and  patriotic  speech  to  a  mixed 
multitude  of  students  and  towns  people ;  he  gets  into 
trouble  with  the  college  authorities ;  he  saves  the  roy 
alist  college  president  from  being  mobbed ;  he  be 
comes  the  first  pamphleteer  among  the  patriots ;  he 
starts  to  recruit  an  artillery  company. 

At  this  time  we  learn  of  him :  "  His  mind  by  now 
was  so  mature  that  he  reminded  himself  with  some 
difficulty  that  he  was  but  seventeen.  He  was  as  live 
ly  and  as  happy  as  ever,  but  that  was  temperamental 
and  was  to  endure  through  all  things;  mentally  he 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

had  no  youth  in  him,  and  had  had  little  since  the  day 
he  began  to  ask  questions." 

We  are  told  that  after  his  first  speech  he  pledges 
himself  to  the  cause  in  a  tavern  in  the  following 
words :  "  I  pledge  myself  to  the  most  sacred  cause 
of  the  American  colonies,  I  vow  to  it  all  my  best  ener 
gies  for  the  rest  of  my  life,  I  swear  to  fight  for  it 
with  my  sword ;  then  when  the  enemy  is  driven  out, 
and  all  the  brain  in  the  country  needed  to  reconstruct 
these  tattered  colonies  and  unify  them  into  one  great 
state,  or  a  group  of  allied  states  which  shall  take  a 
respectable  place  among  nations ;  to  give  her  all  that 
I  have  learned,  all  that  my  brain  is  capable  of  learn 
ing  or  conceiving.  I  believe  that  I  have  certain  abil 
ities,  and  I  solemnly  swear  to  devote  them  wholly  to 
my  country.  And  I  further  swear  that  never,  not 
in  a  single  instance,  will  I  permit  my  personal  am 
bitions  to  conflict  with  what  must  be  the  lifelong  de 
mands  of  this  country." 

Mrs.  Atherton  does  not  try  to  persuade  us  that 
Hamilton  fought  and  won  the  Revolutionary  War, 
and  wrote  and  caused  the  Constitution  to  be  ratified 
single  handed ;  but  she  does  suggest  that,  as  Washing 
ton's  chief  secretary,  he  was  prevented  from  exercis 
ing  military  talents  quite  as  remarkable  as  his  other 
ones,  and  that  he  made  the  sacrifice  not  always  will 
ingly.  Of  his  part  in  the  writing  and  publication 
of  the  Federalist,  and  of  his  services  as  the  first  secre 
tary  of  the  treasury,  there  can  be  no  doubt ;  and  she 
does  not  fail  to  make  the  most  of  this.  Whether 
Hamilton's  fame  is  at  all  appreciably  enhanced  by 
her  persistent  attempt  to  play  the  lime-light  on  him, 
to  represent  him  as  a  theatrical  posturer  and  self- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  413 

conscious  "  leader  of  the  leaders,"  or  by  her  bit 
ter  and  unsparing  partisanship  of  him  and  his  ideals 
against  Clinton,  Madison,  Monroe,  Jefferson  and 
Adams,  is  more  questionable. 

We  may  find  satisfaction  of  a  sort  in  applying 
the  deadly  parallel  of  present  conditions  to  certain 
utterances  of  himself  and  his  friends.  "  '  Go  to  Con 
gress  !  '  he  exclaimed,  '  Who  goes  to  that  ramshackle 
body  that  is  able  to  keep  out  of  it.  Could  they  not 
find  someone  else  to  send  to  distinguish  himself  by 
failure?  .  .  .  There  certainly  is  nothing  in  that  body 
of  old  women  and  lunatics  perpetually  bickering  .  .  . 
to  tempt  the  ambition  of  any  man.  .  .  .  Congress 
appears  to  me  to  be  rooted  contentedly  to  its  chair, 
and  determined  to  do  nothing,  happy  in  the  belief 
that  Providence  has  the  matter  in  hand  and  but  bides 
the  right  time  ...  to  make  the  world  over.  .  .  . 
All  this  State  patriotism  makes  me  sick.  One-half 
were  not  born  in  the  State  they  vociferate  about, 
are  not  certain  of  ending  their  days  there,  nor  of 
which  their  children  may  adopt  as  intemperately.'  ' 

But  we  are  not  convinced  that  such  touches  add 
any  great  literary  grace  and  distinction  to  the  book, 
or  lasting  luster  to  the  character  of  Hamilton,  the 
superman  (as  the  author  conceives  him)  who  has 
taken  a  superhuman  oath,  and  who  is  forced  at  last 
only  by  the  direct  interposition  of  fate,  by  the  vio 
lence  of  his  own  patrician  passions,  by  the  malice  and 
hatred  of  his  plebeian  enemies,  and  by  the  jealousy 
of  one  superhuman  woman,  reputed  daughter  of  a 
king  and  under  a  happier  star  fit  mate  for  him,  to 
decline  and  fall  as  Mrs.  Atherton  makes  him  decline 
and  fall. 


414     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

When  the  author  diagnoses  the  opposition  to  her 
hero  as  "  state  selfishness,  stinginess  and  indifference 
.  .  .  caused  by  the  natural  reversion  of  human  na 
ture  to  first  principles,  after  the  collapse  of  that  en 
thusiasm  which  inflates  mankind  into  a  bombastic 
pride  of  itself,"  we  are  entitled  to  our  reasonable 
doubts.  We  may  even  go  so  far  as  to  ask  her  if 
there  isn't  something  of  the  same  collapse  suggested 
in  the  character  of  her  demigod  as  she  has  chosen  to 
represent  him. 

Whatever  it  may  or  may  not  have  been  in  the  past, 
history  to-day  is  not  made  up  of  the  strivings  of 
demigods  and  demigoddesses,  with  the  rest  of  the 
world  as  lists  for  their  combats  at  arms,  or  as  ante 
rooms  to  the  chambers  of  a  patrician  and  passionate 
joy  of  life. 

History  as  we  know  it  to-day  is  an  evolution,  a 
resultant  of  forces,  wherein  men  like  Hamilton  at  the 
best  are  barely  more  than  the  mouthpiece  of  all  hu 
manity,  or  the  hand  on  the  lever  for  a  day  or  an  hour. 

Hamilton  himself,  if  all  the  credit  given  to  his 
brain  is  true,  though  he  never  seems  to  have  foreseen, 
or  foreshadowed  evolution,  would  be  the  first  to  wish 
to  be  so  judged  and  so  recorded.  People  believe 
what  they  want  to  believe ;  and  so  long  as  there  is 
a  decreasing  minority  of  men  and  women  who  believe 
that  they  are  specially  appointed  to  administer  — 
when  they  are  able  —  the  affairs  of  earth  and  the  rest 
of  the  universe,  by  some  special  hereditary  grace  or 
divine  prerogative,  just  so  long  books  like  The  Con 
queror  will  be  written,  read  and  enthused  over;  their 
literary  flaws,  their  superstitions  and  ethical  perver- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  415 

sions  will  be  condoned;  and  their  writers  will  con 
tinue  to  be  in  the  fashion  where  the  fashion,  hal 
lowed  by  tradition,  is  the  supreme  arbiter. 

Mrs.  Atherton  tells  us  that  Hamilton's  profile  was 
classical.  In  the  statue  of  him  at  Columbia  Univer 
sity  the  nose  is  if  anything  a  trifle  retrousse;  its 
Scotch  bumptiousness  is  evident.  This  fact  or  per 
version  of  fact,  otherwise  inconsiderable,  is  typical  of 
her  presentation  of  the  man,  of  the  whole  book,  of 
the  writer's  whole  attitude  toward  life. 

She  harks  back  to  the  long-winded  speeches  put  in 
the  mouth  of  Greek  and  Roman  oligarchs  and  dic 
tators,  before  or  after  a  battle,  by  their  national  his 
torians.  There  is  an  attempt  to  wear  the  tragic 
buskin  of  ^Eschylus  or  Sophocles  in  Hamilton's  final 
communings  with  his  soul.  In  those  days,  as  now, 
actors  wore  high  heels  to  add  simulated  majesty  to 
their  gait  and  stature.  But  always  when  Mrs.  Ath- 
erton's  striving  for  theatrical  effect  soars  highest, 
when  her  dramatic  monologues  seem  least  stulted  and 
most  adapted  to  her  method,  some  verbal  slip,  some 
unwarrantable  intrusion  of  her  own  personality, 
brings  the  reader  back  to  earth  again. 

The  Conqueror  is  a  long  book  of  more  than  five 
hundred  pages.  We  become  thoroughly  aware  of 
the  fact  before  we  reach  the  end.  We  are  aware  that 
Mrs.  Atherton  hates  Jefferson,  Clinton,  Adams  and 
the  other  contemporary  leaders  of  democracy  in 
America,  if  anything,  harder  than  Hamilton  himself 
did.  In  the  uncompromising  bitterness  with  which 
she  assails  these  three  men,  as  well  as  Madison  and 
Monroe  —  their  private  character;  their  political 
methods  (which  Hamilton  himself  shared  on  her  own 


416     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

showing)  and  the  whole  democratic  ideal  back  of 
them  —  we  feel  that  she  overshoots  the  mark. 

When  she  tries  to  create  the  impression  that  Ham 
ilton  was  fated  to  be  born  abroad;  that  America 
could  by  no  means  and  in  no  case  have  produced  him ; 
and  that  no  native  American  brain  could  have  done 
the  work  that  Hamilton's  did,  then  we  cease  to  re 
gard  her  most  extreme  pretensions  and  most  hide 
bound  prejudices  seriously. 

It  may  be  perfectly  true  that  Talleyrand  meant 
what  he  said  when  he  declared :  "  I  consider  Napo 
leon,  Fox  and  Hamilton  as  the  three  greatest  men  of 
our  epoch,  and  if  I  should  decide  among  the  three  I 
should  give  without  hesitation  the  first  place  to  Ham 
ilton."  It  may  be  equally  true  that  Talleyrand  was 
mistaken.  Talleyrand's  own  evidence  was  not  always 
unimpeachable.  His  acquaintance  with  Hamilton 
during  a  brief  period  of  exile  from  the  Europe  that 
had  cast  him  and  his  master  out,  was  not  conducive 
to  forming  the  most  impartial  opinion  or  to  laying 
down  the  law  finally  for  ourselves  and  for  posterity. 

Hamilton's  services  to  this  country  and  the  rest 
of  the  world  are  unquestionable.  His  fame  as  one 
of  the  master  minds  of  modem  history  stands  as 
sured,  and  is  neither  to  be  magnified  nor  lessened  ap 
preciably  by  the  opinion,  written  or  spoken,  printed 
or  dramatized,  of  any  one  man  or  woman.  He  is  not 
the  first  to  have  suffered  before  or  after  death  by  the 
intemperate  zeal  of  injudicious  friends  or  unscrupu 
lous  partisans. 

Concerning  the  exact  merits  of  his  political  war 
fare  with  Jefferson,  Clinton  &  Co.,  and  later  with 
Adams,  as  well  as  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  setting  forth  of 


MRS.  ATHERTON  417 

them,  it  is  sufficient  to  say  that  this  section  of  the 
book,  as  literature  and  as  adapted  history,  is  quite 
good  enough  for  its  purpose. 

On  Hamilton's  relations  with  his  wife,  who  was  the 
mother  of  eight  children,  or  his  admitted  infidelities 
with  other  women,  and  his  liaison  with  Madame 
Jumel,  there  is  no  necessity  for  dwelling.  Mrs. 
Atherton's  own  account  of  his  courtship,  marriage 
and  subsequent  matrimonial  relations  is  incidental, 
though  not  without  charm  of  a  sort,  in  the  inter 
vals  of  more  pressing  affairs.  Up  to  his  final  in 
fatuation  and  quarrel  with  Burr,  she  takes  the  ground 
consistently  that  this  side  of  his  life,  good  and  bad, 
was  a  minor  issue  beside  his  political  passions,  loy 
alties  and  hatreds,  achievements  and  ideals. 

That  those  ideals  lost  their  first  luster  toward  the 
last  she  makes  us  see  clearly  and  with  considerable 
art.  In  spite  of  her  tendency  to  distort  and  exag 
gerate,  to  make  up  spectacularly  for  the  part,  to 
lay  the  paint  on  thick  and  to  play  the  limelight  un 
remittingly,  Hamilton  as  man  and  as  patriot,  as  she 
shows  him,  retains  our  sympathy  and  respect  to  the 
hour  that  he  goes  to  the  dueling  ground  in  Wee- 
hawken.  Here  at  least  she  does  not  make  a  prig  of 
him ;  and  Burr's  character  and  the  whole  final  episode 
are  treated  with  a  restraint  that  is  equally  unexpected 
and  commendable. 

The  same  cannot  be  said  of  the  whole  of  Hamil 
ton's  final  interview  with  Madame  Jumel  and  his  last 
soliloquy  on  the  night  before  the  duel.  "  '  Yes,'  he 
said  grimly,  '  I  forgive  you.  You  and  Bonaparte 
are  the  two  magnificent  pendants  of  the  French  Rev 
olution.  I  am  sorry  you  are  not  more  of  a  philoso- 


418     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

pher,  but  so  far  as  I  am  concerned  I  regret  nothing.' 

"  '  Oh,'  she  exclaimed  with  scorn.  '  They  are  al 
ways  philosophers  when  they  are  in  love  with  a  wom 
an.  But  you  will  give  me  your  last  conscious  mo 
ment.' 

"  '  No,'  he  said  deliberately,  '  I  shall  not.'  She 
sprang  to  her  feet.  4  You  will !  Thank  you  for  say 
ing  that.  I  was  about  to  grovel  at  your  feet.  Take 
me  to  my  coach.  What  a  fool  I  was  to  come  here.' ' 

There  are  symptoms  of  intellectual  anarchy  here 
as  well  as  in  the  words  that  follow :  "  Every  cow 
herd  hopes  to  be  president.  What  is  the  meaning 
of  civilization,  pray,  if  the  educated,  enlightened, 
broad-minded,  are  not  to  rule?  Is  man  permitted 
to  advance,  progress,  embellish  his  understanding,  for 
his  own  selfish  benefit  or  for  the  benefit  of  mankind? 
And  how  can  his  superiority  avail  his  fellow  men  un 
less  he  be  permitted  to  occupy  the  high  offices  of  re 
sponsibility  !  God  knows  he  is  not  happy  in  his 
power;  he  is  indeed  a  sacrifice  to  the  mass.  But  so 
it  was  intended.  .  .  . 

"  Doubtless  it  seems  to  the  destiny  that  controls 
my  affairs  as  the  swiftest  way  to  dispose  of  Burr 
and  to  awaken  the  country  to  the  other  dangers  that 
menace  it.  To  the  last  I  am  but  a  tool.  No  man 
was  ever  so  little  his  own  master,  so  thrust  upon  a 
planet  for  the  accomplishment  of  public  and  imper 
sonal  ends  alone.  I  have  been  permitted  but  a  cer 
tain  amount  of  domestic  felicity,  as  my  strength  was 
but  conserved  thereby,  my  mind  free  to  concentrate 
upon  public  duties.  I  was  endowed  with  the  gift  of 
fascination  that  men  should  follow  me  without  ques- 


MRS.  ATHERTON  419 

tion  and  this  country  be  served  with  immediate  ef 
fectiveness. 

"  I  have  received  deep  and  profound  satisfaction 
from  both  these  concessions,  but  it  would  not  matter 
in  the  least  if  I  had  not.  They  were  inevitable  with 
its  equipment  for  the  part  I  had  to  play.  I  have 
had  an  astonishing  and  conquering  career  against 
the  mightiest  obstacles,  and  I  may  as  a  further  con 
cession  be  permitted  an  enduring  place  in  history, 
but  that  is  by  the  way. 

"  I  conquered  not  to  gratify  my  love  for  power 
and  win  immortal  fame,  but  that  I  might  accomplish 
the  part  for  which  I  was  whirled  from  an  almost  in 
accessible  island  fifteen  hundred  miles  away.  .  .  . 
The  proof  that  no  native  born  American  could  have 
played  it,  is  the  fact  that  he  did  not." 

Here  we  have  the  wrong  word  cropping  out  again 
and  again,  the  ego  in  the  dramatized  Hamilton's 
cosmos  undisguised;  and,  to  crown  all,  a  piece  of 
woman's  logic  and  patrician  pretentiousness  that 
alone  makes  the  passage  worth  preserving  as  a  liter 
ary  curiosity. 

In  The  Conqueror  Mrs.  Atherton  has  tried  to  write 
a  great  book  and  has  failed  ambitiously.  So  far 
she  has  distinguished  herself  from  one  section  of  the 
mob  of  modern  American  writers.  She  has  made  a 
book  that  is  big  and  gripping  in  more  ways  than 
one.  She  has  at  least  shown  that  she  is  very  much 
alive  and  as  hard  a  fighter  as  Hamilton  himself. 
She  has  shown  still  more  plainly  her  utter  incapacity 
for  understanding  the  beginnings  of  modern  thought 
in  Hamilton's  time,  and  the  new  light  that  to-day's 
scientific  study  of  history  as  an  evolutionary  growth 


420     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

has  thrown  on  his  period  and  our  own.  In  a  drama 
ostensibly  of  heroic  size,  she  has  failed  to  grasp,  or 
has  ch9sen  to  disregard,  the  whole  world  movement 
of  which  our  revolution  formed  a  part,  and  of  which 
America  is  still  to-day  the  most  significant  factor; 
and  she  has  relegated  it  to  the  background  of  the 
stage  which  she  has  erected  for  the  display  of  her 
superman  and  patrician  protagonist. 

She  closes  The  Conqueror,  in  an  effort  for  supreme 
dignity,  with  a  brief  enumeration  of  the  details  of 
Hamilton's  funeral  cortege  that  somehow,  like  the 
rest  of  her  most  ambitious  efforts,  falls  short  of  its 
purpose.  We  are  told  that  the  city  and  the  people 
wore  mourning  for  one  month,  the  bar  of  New  York 
for  six  weeks. 

So  the  story  closes  in  the  conventional  trappings 
of  distinguished  grief,  and  the  only  hint  we  have  as 
to  how  Hamilton  lived  on  in  the  hearts  of  his  family 
and  his  friends  is  a  letter  from  his  wife  written  in 
her  old  age,  incidentally  introduced  earlier  in  the 
book. 

There  is  very  little  in  the  whole  volume  that  is 
vital,  except  its  insufficient  shadowing  forth  of  a  bril 
liant  personality  and  unique  career.  There  is  still 
less  that  is  vital  in  Rulers  of  Kings,  which  was  pub 
lished  two  years  later,  in  1904*.  Dr.  Cooper  calls  it 
fantastic  melodrama  about  comic  opera  kings.  Mrs. 
Atherton  has  succeeded  in  suggesting  something  more 
here,  though  her  tale  savors  equally  of  the  theatrical 
and  the  miraculous.  She  indicates  the  advent  of  the 
United  States  as  a  full-fledged  world  power  under 
the  auspices  of  Fessenden  Abbott  and  his  father,  who 
control  more  than  $400,000,000  between  them.  The 


MRS.  ATHERTON  421 

boy  has  been  brought  up  in  the  Adirondack  wilder 
ness  and  educated  at  a  Western  State  University  in 
ignorance  of  his  parentage.  After  his  graduation  he 
experiences  "  the  most  profound  discouragement  "  at 
the  announcement  of  his  heirship.  Later  he  makes 
himself  dictator  of  South  America ;  tours  Europe  in 
cognito  on  foot  and  in  a  canoe;  forms  a  lasting  al 
liance  with  William  of  Germany,  whom  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton  considers  the  master  mind  of  Europe  to-day ; 
develops  an  electrical  contrivance  which  renders  war 
impossible  by  the  threat  of  instant  and  complete  an 
nihilation  of  all  who  oppose  him ;  falls  in  love  with  a 
fictitious  daughter  of  Franz  Joseph  of  Austria ;  mar 
ries  her  after  sufficient  pressure  has  been  brought 
to  bear  upon  her  father,  and  after  she  has  renounced 
all  pretension  to  her  imperial  rank;  and  goes  back 
to  America  to  purify  the  politics  of  his  native  coun 
try  by  force  and  a  temporary  dictatorship  if  neces 
sary. 

Like  the  majority  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  heroes  and 
heroines,  young  Mr.  Abbott  has  decided  views.  So 
has  his  father.  From  Abbott  pere  we  learn :  '*  Don't 
believe  all  this  twaddle  about  the  rich,  my  son  .  .  . 
most  of  them  have  risen  from  the  ranks  .  .  .  for 
this  country  offers  equal  chances  to  all.  It  is  the 
brains  of  the  men  that  are  not  equal ;  and  every  mil 
lionaire  has  only  himself  —  in  rare  instances  his  im 
mediate  forebears  —  to  thank  that  he  is  not  still 
groveling  with  the  herd,  close  to  the  wall.  .  .  .  There 
was  never  a  real  democrat  who  was  not  born  an  aris 
tocrat.  The  risen  plebeian  is  a  tyrant,  is  insatiable 
in  his  greed,  glories  in  the  thought  of  grinding  the 
life  out  of  thousands  of  his  own  class,  delights  in 


LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

the  hatred  and  envy  which  are  but  another  signal  of 
his  success ;  in  short  he  is  a  damned  fool,  and  deserves 
to  wake  up  and  find  his  throat  cut." 

From  another  source  we  also  learn  "  American 
morals  are  bowrgeoise.  So  is  its  hypocrisy  I  But 
we  like  things  that  way.  .  .  .  The  most  malignant 
force  in  the  world  to-day  is  Russia.  .  .  .  Russia  is 
the  one  menace  which  prevents  Europe  and  England 
from  enjoying  a  moment's  security." 

One  could  hardly  expect  Mrs.  Atherton  to  tell  us 
that  the  real  Yellow  Peril  lies  in  the  modernization 
of  China  as  a  manufacturing  and  exporting  center, 
and  in  her  temporary  or  permanent  alliance  with 
Japan  in  war  and  peace.  Some  suggestion  of  the 
Far  East  as  a  factor  in  world  politics  might  have 
been  expected  of  her  however;  and  her  failure  to  rec 
ognize  what  every  farmer  of  importance  in  the  Middle 
West,  and  each  exporter  of  our  Pacific  slope  knows 
and  reckons  with,  shows  conclusively  just  how  frag 
mentary  and  superficial  the  wide  knowledge  of  life 
for  which  Mr.  Cooper  gives  her  credit  really  is. 

Neither  as  literature  nor  as  a  piece  of  special  plead 
ing  is  Rulers  of  Kings  to  be  taken  seriously.  Dr. 
Cooper  tells  us  that  Ancestors  is.  Here,  he  says, 
she  is  writing  "  plain  truth  about  real  people  that 
she  may  have  known  personally  .  .  .  picturing  how 
the  magic  glamour  of  California  may  react  upon  a 
Conservative  Englishman  .  .  .  until  he  ends  by  prov 
ing  himself  a  better  American  than  the  Californians 
themselves.  It  is  a  big  book,  undeniably  a  book  of 
almost  epic  sweep.  The  protagonist  is  not  Jack 
Gwinne  the  Americanized  Englishman,  nor  Isabel  Otis 
.  .  .  but  the  city  of  San  Francisco  which  dominates 


MRS.  ATHERTON  423 

the  book,  like  a  regal  and  capricious  heroine  whose 
hour  of  agony  by  earthquake  and  by  fire  closes  the 
volume  with  the  shadow  of  a  cosmic  tragedy." 

Charity  to  Dr.  Cooper  suggests  that  he  either 
wrote  this  in  a  hurry,  or  in  the  fine  frenzy  of  a  some 
what  surcharged  literary  imagination,  and  then 
failed  to  revise  it. 

Ancestors,  1907,  is  a  big  book  in  its  scope  and  in  its 
suggestions,  as  often  as  not  in  its  handling.  It  meas 
ures  somewhere  up  to  the  theme  indicated.  There  is 
hardly  a  dull  page  in  it  from  cover  to  cover.  At  first 
reading  it  is  apt  to  promise  more  than  it  fulfills.  A 
second  critical  perusal,  however,  leaves  one  with  the 
impression  that  Mrs.  Atherton  (as  she  generally 
does,  except  in  mere  episodes  of  life  abroad  like  Tht 
Travelling  Thirds,  1905)  falls  considerably  below 
the  goal  she  has  marked  out  for  herself,  both  in  de 
tail  and  in  the  mass. 

Here  as  elsewhere  she  must  be  given  credit  for 
originality.  She  has  invented  or  discovered  a  new 
brand  of  international  marriage,  frequently  paralleled 
to  some  extent  in  her  own  native  state,  but  compara 
tively  unknown  in  American  fiction. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  John  Elton  Gynne  (obviously 
drawn  to  life  from  the  English  Winston  Churchill) 
is  an  American  by  birth,  by  accident ;  though  at  the 
same  time  heir  to  one  of  the  greatest  ducal  houses 
of  Great  Britain.  In  the  first  part  of  the  book  his 
career  as  coming  leader  of  the  House  of  Commons 
comes  to  a  tragic  close  through  the  sudden  death  of 
his  two  nearest  male  relatives. 

Isabel  Otis,  his  third  cousin,  a  Californian,  unmar 
ried  and  very  much  her  own  mistress  —  and  mistress 


424     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

also  of  a  chicken  ranch  and  some  thousands  of  acres 
of  marshland  across  the  bay  from  San  Francisco  — 
persuades  him  to  emigrate  to  the  United  States  and 
to  become  the  coming  man  in  American  politics. 

He  travels  from  Maine  to  Florida  and  from  New 
York  to  San  Francisco  for  something  like  a  year ;  he 
becomes  desperately  lonely  and  disillusioned;  he  even 
begins  to  doubt  his  own  Napoleonic  star.  He  comes 
back  to  the  larger  ranch  that  he  owrns  besides  his 
cousin's,  starts  to  study  law  in  the  neighboring 
country  seat  of  Rosewater  and  lays  the  foundations 
of  his  future  popularity  there. 

Here  he  becomes  acquainted  with  Tom  Colton,  a 
relative  of  Isabel's  by  marriage,  whom  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton  evidently  considers  a  typical  machine  politician 
of  suburban  California,  and  who  rarely  appears  in 
the  light  of  day  without  a  large  bag  of  peanuts  and 
a  big  red  apple  which  he  munches  indiscriminately. 
By  him  we  are  told :  "  I  can't  say  that  I  like  the 
seamy  side  of  politics.  .  .  .  My  wife  always  says 
that  I'm  the  most  honest  man  alive,  and  I  shouldn't 
wonder  if  that  was  the  way  I  really  was  made.  Any 
how  I  know  that  I'd  a  heap  sight  rather  do  a  man  a 
good  turn  than  an  ill  one;  but  when  he  gets  in 
your  way,  what  are  you  going  to  do  in  a  country 
where  politics  are  machine-made  and  every  cog  has 
to  be  oiled  with  graft  ?  "  To  this  query  neither 
young  Mr.  Gynne  nor  the  book  itself  provides  any 
sufficient  or  significant  answer. 

Mrs.  Atherton,  in  common  with  others  here  or 
abroad,  has,  or  professes  to  have,  a  vast  scorn  for 
pseudo-reformers  or  real  reformers  who  join  the 
great  majority;  whose  "zeal  for  reform  had  played 


MRS.  ATHERTON  425 

between  the  horizon  and  the  zenith  like  a  flaming 
sword,"  which  "  served  its  purpose  —  if  to  be  sure 
it  was  needed  at  all  "  —  till  its  owners  were  past 
masters  of  success. 

Of  quite  a  different  type  are  the  little  group  of 
civic  life  savers  in  San  Francisco,  headed  by  a  few 
rich  men  that  the  world  has  heard  of.  Gynne  be 
comes  acquainted  with  these,  and  decides  to  go  to 
Washington  to  have  the  question  of  his  nation 
ality  settled  for  good  and  all.  On  his  return,  rejoic 
ing  in  his  birthright  as  an  American  citizen,  he  finds 
that  feminine  gossip  in  Rosewater  has  busied  itself 
with  his  cousin's  name  and  his  own. 

Isabel  like  himself  has  decided  views,  and  having 
arrived  at  the  mature  age  of  something  like  thirty 
years,  she  does  not  hesitate  to  act  on  them.  She  in 
sists  on  living  alone  on  her  chicken  ranch  with  a  Jap 
anese  man  servant  and  one  or  two  other  male  labor 
ers,  and  on  seeing  her  cousin  wherever  and  whenever 
she  pleases. 

Gynne  makes  up  his  mind  at  last  that  she  will 
make  an  ideal  wife  for  a  rising  young  politician ;  and 
just  as  they  have  decided  to  get  married,  after  she 
has  protested  for  more  than  a  year  that  single  bless 
edness  is  quite  good  enough  for  her,  and  that  mere 
domesticity  belongs  to  the  dark  ages,  the  San  Fran 
cisco  earthquake  arrives,  and  the  story  ends  in  a  final 
blaze  of  glory  with  the  burning  city  for  the  back 
ground  and  middle  distance. 

Here  Mrs.  Atherton  seems  at  last  to  have  learned 
the  value  of  restraint,  or  to  have  estimated  accu 
rately  the  comparative  inadequacy  of  her  powers. 
The  description,  such  as  it  is,  is  graphic  and  stirring ; 


426     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

like  most  of  her  descriptions  it  is  directly  personal. 
A  few  of  the  most  obvious  general  features  are  noted. 
The  immediate  effect  on  the  characters  with  whom  she 
is  most  concerned  is  succinctly  set  forth.  The 
whole  effect  none  the  less  is  one  of  superficiality,  and 
the  impression  persists  that  she  has  missed  more 
chances  than  she  has  scored  hits. 

Earlier  or  later  in  the  book  we  have  unhealthy  in 
terior  glimpses  of  English  country  houses,  Lon 
don  clubs  and  San  Francisco  Bohemian  dives,  to  some 
extent  counteracted  by  a  sincere  feeling  for  the 
beauty  and  undeveloped  resources  of  California  out 
doors.  Her  major  and  many  of  her  minor  charac 
ters  are  interesting  and  well  drawn.  Several  of  them 
are,  even  Mr.  Howells  might  admit,  fairly  human, 
simple,  sincere,  natural  and  likeable.  Traces  of  deep 
and  sincere  feeling  are  singularly  lacking  or  barely 
sketched  in.  The  patrician  tradition  is  rather  sug 
gested  than  insisted  upon.  The  author  has  to  some 
extent  gained  in  objectivity,  and  literary  discern 
ment,  at  the  same  time  her  individuality  seems  to 
have  lost  force  and  vital  interest  and  is  still  a  long 
way  from  the  patient  apprenticeship  to  the  story 
teller's  art  that  alone  might  make  the  most  of  her 
truly  original  powers. 

In  Tower  of  Ivory,  1910,  she  has  gone  back  a  step 
or  two  from  the  standard  set  by  Ancestors.  The  story 
is  that  of  an  American  opera  singer  residing  in  Mu 
nich  as  a  fixture  of  the  Bavarian  Court,  and  a  young 
English  cad  of  title  in  the  British  diplomatic 
service.  Halfway  through  the  book  he  marries  an 
American  heiress  who  angles  for  him  desperately 
with  the  help  of  her  mother  and  other  women  who 


MRS.  ATHERTON  427 

might  be  better  employed.  The  bride  objects  to  liv 
ing  out  of  England  and  has  no  use  for  diplomacy  as 
a  profession  for  the  husband  of  a  multi-millionairess. 
About  the  time  that  an  heir  is  expected,  her  husband 
goes  back  to  relations  rather  less  than  platonic  with 
the  opera  singer,  his  wife  dies  in  childbirth,  and  we 
are  left  to  infer  that  the  doctrine  of  temperamental 
affinities  and  of  intellectual  anarchy  has  hereby  taken 
a  long  step  towards  its  final  goal. 

The  characters  of  the  heiress,  her  mother  and  her 
husband  are  close  and  accurate  studies;  one  is  made 
to  realize  that  there  are  such  people  in  the  world, 
however  little  one  may  care  to  know  it  or  them.  That 
of  the  op€ra  singer  —  on  which,  with  that  of  her 
hero,  the  writer  seems  to  have  expended  the  greater 
part  of  her  time  and  sympathy  in  her  attempt  to 
score  heavily  —  produces  an  effect  of  pretentious 
ness,  literary  snobbery,  wasted  labor  and  a  general 
bad  taste  in  the  mouth,  such  as  only  Mrs.  Atherton 
can  achieve  when  she  lays  herself  out  on  the  work. 

To  say  that  she  has  a  rival  of  a  sort  in  Henry 
James,  whom  she  affects  to  admire,  and  that  like  him 
at  her  worst  she  is  reactionary  and  decadent,  rarely 
inspiring,  frequently  inhuman  and  unnatural,  almost 
never  humorous  of  her  own  free  will,  disposes  of  her 
neither  finally  nor  altogether. 

In  Tower  of  Ivory  and  in  Julia  France,  1912,  she 
has  gone  far  towards  relegating  herself  definitely  to 
the  ranks  of  the  more  neurotic  lady  novelists,  and  as 
such  she  is  comparatively  insignificant.  As  a  type 
and  the  mouthpiece  of  a  certain  phase  of  feminism 
up  to  date  in  America  and  abroad  she  deserves  seri 
ous  study. 


428     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Julia  Kaye,  one  of  her  characters  in  Ancestors 
concerning  whom  she  says  that  "  she  was  a  very  clever 
woman,  for  snobbery  had  planted  and  demoralized 
only  one  small  chamber  in  her  brain,"  bears  a  cer 
tain  likeness  to  this  type.  There  is  a  suggestion  of 
Satan's  rebuking  sin  in  these  words  and  their  source. 

Snobbery  of  the  intellect,  resting  on  its  oars  and 
its  denunciation  of  what  it  considers  commonplace, 
crude,  merely  domestic,  democratic,  plebeian,  tire 
some,  undistinguished,  unprogressive,  is  merely  one 
phase  of  the  mental  and  moral  neurosis  that  has  at 
tacked  an  irreducible  minimum  of  the  unfair  sex  in 
both  hemispheres  during  the  last  fifty  or  sixty  years. 
In  Julia  France  and  Her  Times  such  snobbery  be 
comes  acute,  but  it  does  not  see  fit  to  rest  on  its 
oars. 

In  this  book  Mrs.  Atherton  harks  back  to  the  wom 
en  of  Imperial  Rome  and  their  Parisian  variants  in 
her  title  and  general  tendency.  In  the  locale  of  her 
plot  she  harks  back  to  Nevis  and  St.  Kitts  in 
the  first  book.  Here  the  action  is  dominated  by  a  ma 
triarch  of  the  old  school,  still  dear  to  the  author  (for 
merly  illustrated  by  her  portrait  of  Hamilton's  mother 
in  The  Conqueror),  who  takes  life  as  she  finds  it  in  her 
corner  of  the  world;  who  accepts  man  like  the  rest 
of  her  environment  after  the  traditional  manner  of 
women  through  the  centuries ;  who  manages  to  profit 
directly  or  indirectly  from  man's  vices  and  complacen 
cies  ;  and  who  succeeds  eventually  in  transmitting  to 
her  daughters  and  granddaughters  the  same  unin 
spiring  knowledge  of  the  evil  that  men  and  women 
do,  and  of  the  seamy  side  of  life. 

Mrs.  Edis  of  "  Great  House,"  Julia's  mother,  has 


MRS.  ATHERTON  429 

failed  in  a  career  for  herself.  She  remains  a  schem 
ing  mother  of  considerable  force  of  character. 

In  the  first  section  of  the  book  we  meet  also  the 
captain  of  a  visiting  British  warship,  who  ineffectu 
ally  suggests  to  Mrs.  Edis  that  women  nowadays 
are  working  out  destinies  for  themselves  as  authors, 
painters,  singers,  even  on  the  stage;  Lieutenant 
Harold  France,  who  has  gone  the  pace  to  the  limit, 
who  thinks  he  is  ready  to  marry  and  settle  down  as 
soon  as  he  sees  Julia,  who  also  happens  to  be  the 
nephew  of  a  duke ;  and  Julia  herself,  a  "  happy 
young  animal  "  and  child  of  eighteen,  decidedly  less 
mature  physically  than  most  girls  born  in  the  tropics, 
and  absolutely  unsophisticated,  if  her  creator  and 
idolater  is  to  be  trusted,  as  regards  life  at  large. 

Mrs.  Edis  is  said  to  believe  in  the  stars ;  Julia  ap 
pears  to  believe  in  her  mother  in  the  same  way,  and 
after  thirty-eight  pages  of  rather  prosaic  preamble 
we  are  told  "  so  the  fate  of  Julia  France  was  sealed," 
and  the  action  shifts  to  London.  Here  we  find  Julia, 
twenty-four  days  married,  waiting  for  her  husband, 
who  is  expected  back  from  his  last  cruise  in  the 
Royal  Navy  in  the  course  of  a  month  or  two.  We 
learn  that  France  went  on  board  his  ship  some  two 
hours  after  the  wedding  ceremony,  and  we  are  pre 
sented  with  several  indifferently  well  done  portraits 
of  London  society  types  of  the  sort  that  bore  others 
and  themselves  habitually  —  types  that  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton  has  shown  some  capacity  to  choose  and  to  dwell 
upon  before. 

Among  others  we  meet  a  young  man  recently  out 
of  Oxford,  by  the  name  of  Herbert,  whose  father  is 
a  radical  peer,  and  who  comes  close  to  falling  in  love 


430     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

with  Julia  at  first  sight.  We  are  informed  that 
"  English  people,  no  matter  how  frivolous,  are  never 
as  empty-headed  as  Americans  of  the  same  class  " ; 
we  are  told  that  "  Herbert  felt  a  wild  sense  of  ex 
ultation  and  an  equally  wild  impulse  to  save  her  " 
after  Julia's  predicament  is  placed  before  him. 

From  this  point  the  action  of  the  five  hundred  and 
thirty-three  page  book  proceeds  with  a  certain  in 
tensity  of  interest  where  the  author  does  not  pause 
to  take  up  women  suffrage,  East  Indian  occultism, 
Socialism  and  the  Bahai  religion  as  component  parts 
of  a  new  peace  propaganda;  or  to  dwell  upon  va 
rious  other  personal  applications  of  Mrs.  Atherton's 
formula  "  for  drawing  strength  out  of  the  universe  " 
and  for  feeding  a  ravenous  egotism  which  Julia  in 
the  course  of  time  comes  to  share  noticeably  with 
her  creator. 

In  all  this,  in  spite  of  herself,  Mrs.  Atherton  pro 
vides  on  the  whole  a  stimulating  diet.  Whether  she 
fully  justifies  the  claims  of  her  English  publishers 
and  other  English  critics,  to  be  the  most  highly  pow 
ered  brain  among  women  novelists  in  America,  may 
be  safely  left  for  posterity  to  decide. 

Julia's  development  proceeds  rapidly  after  France's 
return  and  the  consummation  of  their  marriage.  Be 
fore  this  she  has  made  the  acquaintance  of  two  young 
London  women  of  society,  Bridget  Herbert  and  Ishbel 
Jones  —  one  the  daughter  of  a  decayed  duke,  the  other 
the  wife  of  a  millionaire  stock  broker  —  who  eventually 
lead  her  into  the  ranks  of  the  militant  Suffragettes ; 
and  of  the  young  Oxford  man  who  makes  an  inef 
fective  effort  to  save  her  from  the  arms  of  the  Mina- 
tour  to  whom  she  is  promised. 


MRS.  ATHERTON  431 

France  comes  home  to  claim  his  bride,  and  Mrs. 
Atherton  proceeds  to  paint  a  picture  of  a  bogey  man 
and  Frankenstein  monster  that  is  frequently  ludi 
crous  where  she  wants  it  to  be  most  impressive.  To 
say  that  Mrs.  Atherton's  characterization  of  Harold 
France  —  from  his  first  appearance  in  the  prologue 
to  his  final  incarceration  in  an  expensive  sanatorium 
after  an  unsuccessful  attempt  to  murder  the  duke, 
his  uncle,  at  the  end  of  the  two  hundred  and  seventh 
page  and  of  Book  III  —  occasionally  fails  to  con 
vince,  is  to  understate  the  truth. 

As  a  piece  of  modern  pathologic  infection  and  re 
alism  for  realism's  sake,  dealing  with  various  symp 
toms  of  progressive  paranoia,  this  part  of  this  book 
does  not  shine  by  comparison  with  various  neurotic 
heroes  of  fiction  and  the  drama,  from  Flaubert's 
Madame  Bovary  to  Strindberg's  Thekla  and  Froken 
Julie;  from  Maupassant's  male  and  female  degener 
ates  to  those  in  Ibsen's  Ghosts  and  Hedda  Gabler. 

It  has  been  said  of  Strindberg  that  he  set  out  to 
find  God  and  discovered  the  devil.  Few  if  any  have 
accused  Mrs.  Atherton  of  starting  with  Strindberg's 
original  intention,  and  few  if  any  will  be  quite  ready 
to  believe  that  the  devil,  in  the  person  of  Harold 
France,  is  quite  as  black  as  she  has  seen  fit  to  try  to 
paint  him. 

We  may  imagine  that  Mrs.  Atherton  has  at  one 
time  or  another  been  too  close  to  her  subject,  in  her 
own  life  or  that  of  her  friends,  to  write  about  it  with 
perfect  charity  and  breadth  of  view.  We  may  fancy 
that  a  certain  sneaking  fondness  for  rakes  and  roues 
of  title,  which  has  cropped  out  more  than  once  in  her 
earlier  work,  has  led  the  author  to  make  certain  epi- 


432     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

sodes  in  the  decline  and  fall  of  France,  certain  peri 
odic  trips  to  Paris,  connived  at  by  his  wife  so  long  as 
the  allowance  made  to  them  by  the  duke  remains  in 
tact,  almost  the  most  natural  and  human  if  not  the 
most  edifying  part  of  the  book. 

Or  else  we  may  be  forced  to  conclude  that  Mrs. 
Atherton  of  set  purpose  and  deliberate  design  has 
raised  up  this  scapegoat,  this  scare-crow,  this  bogey 
man,  this  Frankenstein  monster,  as  a  provocative  in 
print,  and  a  lethal  weapon  in  the  war  of  the  sexes 
that  she  and  her  friends  are  waging. 

Doubtless  there  are  men  in  London,  more  or  less 
tolerated  in  Society,  who  abuse  their  wives  drunk  or 
sober.  Doubtless  some  of  them  make  a  practice  of 
it.  Doubtless  some  of  these  offenders  of  titles  or 
heirs  to  titles  are  not  locked  up  in  prisons  or  insane 
asylums  as  soon  as  they  might  be  otherwise,  as  a  re 
sult  of  the  snobbery  and  caste  worship  which  Eng 
land,  still  "  the  apex  of  the  world's  civilization  "  in 
Mrs.  Atherton's  estimation,  jealously  guards  and 
hugs  to  her  breast. 

Doubtless  at  the  same  time  there  are  female  male 
factors  of  great  rank  and  notorious  social  prestige, 
whom  the  same  caste  worship  still  favors  at  the  ex 
pense  of  the  rest  of  the  world. 

Mrs.  Atherton  naturally  has  nothing  to  say  about 
this.  It  is  no  part  of  her  Feminist  propaganda  to 
muck-rake  caste  and  social  rottenness  in  England  in 
its  most  offensive  female  manifestations  and  from  the 
man's  and  the  child's  point  of  view. 

Doubtless  there  are  men  in  the  world,  insane  or 
nearly  so,  who  take  a  peculiar  pleasure  in  humiliating 
their  wives  socially  at  home  and  abroad;  who  might 


MRS.  ATHERTON  433 

even  have  the  wit  to  send  street-walkers  into  a  shop, 
in  which  their  martyrized  better  half  was  interested, 
shortly  before  the  expected  event  of  royalty  itself. 

Mrs.  Atherton  proceeds  to  make  all  the  capital  she 
can  out  of  this  hypothetical  incident ;  at  the  same 
time  she  claims  to  be  a  good  American  and  democrat, 
not  to  say  socialist,  so  far  as  she  or  anyone  else  can 
reconcile  these  claims. 

All  this  is  fictional  license  of  a  sort  legitimate 
enough  when  used  by  the  hand  of  a  master,  master 
fully.  But  when  Mrs.  Atherton  makes  her  heroine 
sleep  with  one  loaded  pistol  under  her  pillow,  an 
other  within  arm's  reach,  and  three  or  more  scattered 
about  the  house;  when  Julia  goes  home  voluntarily 
from  her  hat  shop  to  this  sort  of  thing  and  thrives 
on  it  for  months,  consoled  by  the  thought  that  there 
fore  her  friend,  Ishbel  Jones,  will  be  left  in  peace  to 
support  her  ex-millionaire  stock-broker  husband, 
now  ruined  and  helpless  as  a  result  of  speculation  in 
stocks  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  in  South  Africa 
caused  by  the  greed  and  capacious  extravagance  of 
men  alone :  then  we  begin  to  suspect  that  Mrs.  Ather 
ton  is  laying  it  on  a  bit  thick,  either  with  her  tongue 
in  her  cheek,  or  with  the  same  scatter-brain  and  mili 
tant  attention  to  details  and  failure  to  focus  higher 
and  finer,  wider  and  deeper  issues,  that  has  character 
ized  equally  much  of  her  former  work  in  fiction  and  a 
great  deal  of  the  more  militant  activity  of  her  shriek 
ing  sisters  in  the  Votes  for  Women  sex  war. 

It  is  true  that  in  spots  the  dialogue  of  Book  III, 
Harold  France,  is  rather  divertingly  melodramatic 
not  to  say  farcical.  It  is  also  true  that  Julia  is  ani 
mated  by  one  more  heroic  motive  in  her  self-immola- 


434     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

tion  in  the  house  of  France  up  to  the  time  of  Mr. 
Jones's  death ;  i.  e.,  loyalty  to  the  cause  of  the  mili 
tant  Suffragettes,  whose  ranks  both  Ishbel  and 
Bridget  have  long  since  joined  —  early  in  the  book, 
more  than  a  third  of  which  is  devoted  at  recurrent 
intervals  to  the  unfairness  of  man  and  the  excel 
lencies  of  woman  as  Mrs.  Atherton  sees  or  seems  to  see 
them. 

Judged  as  literature,  very  little  of  this  is  worth  the 
time  and  space  spent  on  it;  considered  as  a  criticism 
of  life,  the  final  verdict  is  the  same ;  though  here  and 
there  Mrs.  Atherton  proves  sufficiently  stimulating 
in  her  wrong-headed  way,  like  the  movement  she  rep 
resents,  to  those  who  for  various  reasons  have  hith 
erto  failed  to  find  anything  else  in  the  world  worth 
fighting  and  working  hard  for. 

Mrs.  Atherton  does  not  go  so  far  as  to  claim  that 
all  girls  and  women  shall  immediately  be  made  a  little 
lower  or  higher  than  the  angels  by  votes  for  women. 

She  does  claim  and  hope,  or  seems  to  claim  and 
hope,  however,  that  a  new  race  of  super-women  is 
evolving;  women  whose  brains  shall  dominate,  who 
shall  be  complete  in  themselves,  far  more  than  men 
have  ever  been  complete ;  women  in  whom  sex  is  a 
by-product,  maternity  a  dead  issue,  and  love  a  minor 
religion,  an  incidental  vice,  or  a  mere  episode  in  their 
gradual  mastery  of  the  rest  of  the  world. 

She  claims  that  the  militant  Suffragettes  in  Eng 
land  already  represent  the  nucleus  of  this  new  sex. 
"  I  feel  sure  the  time  will  come  when  every  self-re 
specting  woman  will  want  to  be  the  author  of  her  own 
income  —  when  no  girl  will  marry  till  she  is."  She 
says  on  the  next  page :  "  We  women  want  many 


MRS.  ATHERTON  435 

things  beside  love,  we  Englishwomen  at  least,  for  we 
belong  to  the  most  highly  developed  nation  on  the 
globe,  and  we  are  the  daughters  of  men  as  well  as  of 
women,  remember.  And  we  have  heard  affairs  of  the 
world  discussed  at  table  since  we  have  left  the  nur 
sery." 

She  says  on  the  next  page :  "  Merely  put  your 
name  over  the  door  to  draw  the  customers  and  pocket 
the  proceeds.  By  no  means.  What  possible  satisfac 
tion  could  I  get  out  of  making  other  people  do  what 
I  want  to  do  myself?  The  joy  of  succeeding  must 
lie  in  the  effort  in  knowing  that  you  are  doing  some 
thing  that  no  one  else  can  do  in  quite  the  same  way. 
I  can  be  an  artist  even  in  hats  and  I  propose  to  be 
one." 

Here  as  elsewhere  the  author  glances  over  the  sur 
face  of  one  or  two  truths  old  as  the  hills,  more  or  less 
accurately  apprehended  and  applied  several  cen 
turies  before  the  Votes  for  Women  movement  set  up 
its  standard  of  the  super-sex. 

If  art  is  life  viewed  through  a  temperament,  we  can't 
envy  Mrs.  Atherton  her  selection  of  smart  hats  and 
gowns  from  Paris  and  Regent  Street,  interior  decora 
tions  made  at  Maple's,  and  feudal  castles  modernized 
only  in  the  author's  prime  essential  of  open  plumb 
ing,  as  the  high  lights  and  chief  scenic  decorations 
of  her  novelized  color  schemes  to  the  exclusion  of 
children,  dogs,  horses,  gardens  and  all  outdoors  and 
the  rest  of  life. 

We  don't  even  think  that  this  sort  of  thing  repre 
sents  English  feudalism,  ancient  and  modern,  in  town 
and  in  country,  accurately  and  adequately  from 
merely  the  pictorial  and  fictional  point  of  view. 


436     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Furthermore,  if  the  distinction  between  morality 
and  immorality  be  that  between  construction  and  de 
struction  of  power,  we  are  inclined  to  question  the 
large  or  small  moral  gains  derived  from  the  efforts 
of  her  heroines  to  make  their  new  hat  shop  the  smart 
est  and  most  extravagant  in  all  London;  to  question 
further  the  supreme  excellence  of  any  ideal  or  prac 
tical  work  that  depends  on  the  patronage  of  royalty 
for  its  chief  advertising  asset ;  and  to  hail  with  a  more 
or  less  unregenerate  joy  the  temporary  success  of 
Harold  France,  the  Man  Monster,  in  putting  the 
brakes  on  Julia  and  Ishbel's  production  of  commercial 
ized  art-millinery,  and  on  the  more  militant  ac 
tivities  depending  directly  on  the  financial  success 
of  the  Bond  Street  hat  shop. 

Mrs.  Atherton  is  at  heart  like  many  of  her  Suffra 
gette  sisters,  an  ultra-patrician,  though  like  many  of 
them  she  pretends  to  be  a  kid-glove  and  silk-stock 
ing  Socialist  and  an  advocate  of  the  purest  democ 
racy  the  world  has  yet  seen.  Applied  democracy  in 
America  and  England  shocks  and  revolts  her,  as  it 
does  the  majority  of  minds  too  small  to  focus  its  im 
mediate  details  in  something  like  cosmic  perspective 
with  its  ultimate  destiny. 

Applied  feudalism  in  England  has  always  appealed 
to  her  personally  and  temperamentally ;  none  the  less, 
like  many  others  of  her  particular  sub-species  of  the 
genus  homo,  she  has  observed  of  late  that  something 
like  a  period  is  being  put  to  its  most  peculiar  and  ex 
tortionate  prerogatives  in  the  British  Isles.  In  her 
native  land  she  has  long  observed  the  same  sort  of 
thing  with  sorrow  and  dismay.  Her  earlier  books 
testify  to  this  freely. 


MRS.  ATHERTON  437 

In  this  book  she  makes  one  of  her  own  characters 
say  that  birth  is  less  and  less  of  a  social  and  political 
asset  in  England  nowadays.  Having  declared  some 
time  since  that  Christianity  cannot  satisfy  the  intel 
lectual  needs  of  the  Twentieth  Century,  and  having 
found  no  reason  to  alter  that  view  in  the  meantime, 
she  finds  herself  forced  to  fall  back  upon  the  super- 
sex  theory  for  a  new  special  interest  and  patrician 
prerogative  to  grasp  for  herself,  and  to  help  her  fel 
low-patricians  at  heart  and  Socialist  and  Suffragettes 
superficially  to  have  and  to  hold. 

She  claims  that  every  truly  modern  woman  wants 
to  make  money  as  well  as  a  career  for  herself,  before 
marriage  as  well  as  after. 

What  she  really  tells  us,  however,  is  that  the  new 
super-woman,  as  she  sets  her  forth,  is  quite  as 
ready  to  steal  money  (a  la  Bond  Street  hat  shops  at 
record  prices),  and  to  pirate  power  after  the  meth 
ods  of  the  tribe  of  Pankhurst,  in  the  "  grand  man 
ner  "  that  Mrs.  Atherton  here  gives  abundant  signs 
of  approving  (and  which  she  shares  or  would  like  to 
share  equally  with  a  Tammany  boss  and  an  English 
or  Russian  reactionary  duke  or  grand  duke),  as  any 
of  the  merely  male  conquerors  and  patrician  pirates 
of  the  past  that  she  has  already  deified  in  the  person 
of  Alexander  Hamilton  and  his  immediate  forebears 
and  followers. 

So  far  conclusive  evidence  is  lacking  that  she  and 
the  people  she  most  approves,  in  her  last  book  and 
in  the  world  at  large,  have  evolved  noticeably  beyond 
the  "  good  old  plan  that  those  that  have  should  hold 
the  power  and  those  should  take  who  can,"  in  their 
criticism  and  conduct  of  life. 


438  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

The  same  old  male  pirate  formula,  the  same  old 
militant  tactics  of  grab  all  you  can  comfortably  or 
safely  hold,  waste  and  destroy  indiscriminately  wher 
ever  your  own  cause  is  helped  and  your  enemy's  hurt ; 
bluff,  brag,  bluster  and  bully  to  the  limit  in  the  sacred 
name  of  freedom  or  whatever  else  is  your  watchword 
for  the  hour  —  these  have  already  been  sufficiently 
exemplified  and  exploited  in  the  course  of  the  win 
dow-smashing  campaign  in  London  to  need  any 
further  recapitulation  here.  What  is  needed  here 
is  emphasis  of  the  fact  that  there  is  a  new  Twen 
tieth  Century  "  special  interest " :  as  egotistic,  as 
grasping,  as  ruthless  of  results  as  any  class  or  caste 
movement  that  history  has  known. 

And  the  leaders  of  this  movement  are  the  super- 
women  of  whom  Mrs.  Atherton  says :  "  They  are 
like  no  other  women  under  the  sun  —  nor  any  sun 
that  has  ever  shone.  They've  a  new  group  of  brain 
cells  —  they've  got  the  same  look  those  old  leader- 
martyrs  had  when  chained  up  to  the  stake  —  the  same 
grim,  patient  mouths,  the  same  clairvoyant  eyes  — 
their  enthusiasm  is  cold  and  eternal.  They  are  as 
deliberate  as  death.  There  are  no  better  brains  in 
the  world.  Precious  few  as  good.  They  never  take 
a  step  that  isn't  calculated  beforehand,  and  they 
never  take  a  step  backward.  Discouragement  and 
fear  are  sensations  they  have  never  experienced. 
When  they  are  hurt  they  don't  know  it.  They  fear 
injury  or  death  no  more  than  they  fear  the  brutes 
that  maul  them.  In  short,  they're  a  new  force  let 
loose  into  the  world  and  the  geese  outside  put  them 
down  as  hysterical  females." 

Admitting  that  much  of  this  may  be  true  of  the 


MRS.  ATHERTON  439 

best  of  the  fanatic  leaders  of  Votes  for  Women  in 
England,  much  of  this  passage  and  the  rest  of  the 
book  sounds  suspiciously  like  Mr.  Sedgwick's  "  mob 
spirit  in  literature." 

Mrs.  Atherton  compares  these  women  to  the  mar 
tyrs  of  old  inconclusively.  So  far  they  have  at 
least  stopped  short  on  the  safe  side  of  martyrdom. 
And  Mrs.  Atherton  shows  us  in  detail  that  Julia 
France  did. 

Like  most  Suffragettes,  she  is  rather  more  sparing 
of  detail  when  it  comes  to  showing  us  what  a  woman 
will  do  with  the  vote  when  she  gets  it.  She  says 
something  about  a  Woman's  Parliament  to  deal  ex 
clusively  with  the  poor  laws,  and  about  various  local 
and  general  boards,  composed  solely  of  women,  to 
deal  with  all  matters  concerning  the  rights  and  ne 
cessities  of  women  and  children. 

These  are  Mrs.  Atherton's  sole  constructive  sug 
gestions  (besides  the  segregation  of  a  men's  parlia 
ment  to  deal  apparently  with  foreign  and  fiscal 
affairs)  as  to  the  possible  results  of  the  present  win 
dow-smashing  crusade. 

Probably  the  best  brains  of  the  Suffragettes  — 
"  than  whom  there  are  no  better  in  the  world  " —  are 
not  directly  responsible  for  this  truly  brilliant  ef 
fort  of  Mrs.  Atherton  (whom  many  English  men 
and  women  believe  to  have  the  best  brain  of  any 
woman  novelist  in  America)  to  picture  two  parlia 
ments  of  the  sexes  in  England,  independent,  co-ex 
istent,  and  equally  powerful  in  their  respective  and 
interesting  spheres. 

Mrs.  Atherton,  like  many  of  her  English  patrician 
friends,  thinks  she  knows  something  of  world  politics 


440     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

from  the  outside.  She  has  shown  no  further  evi 
dence,  here  or  elsewhere,  of  even  thinking  she  knows 
anything  about  applied  sociology  and  the  modern 
science  of  industrial  and  evolutionary  history  from 
the  bottom  up. 

Some  elementary  acquaintance  with  the  basic  phe 
nomena  of  both  sciences,  and  the  most  obvious  results 
of  her  project,  might  have  led  her  to  question  just 
how,  with  two  sex  parliaments,  each  supreme  in  its 
own  sphere,  in  existence  at  the  same  time,  the  small 
matters  of  child  welfare,  factory  and  school  laws, 
income  tax  and  general  budget  legislation,  and  the 
equally  pressing  needs  of  Dreadnaught  and  super- 
Dreadnaught  building,  and  general  military  and 
naval  efficiency,  are  to  be  reconciled  and  thrashed  out 
to  a  practical  solution. 

A  few  women,  Suffragettes  and  Antis  both,  and  not 
a  few  men,  are  already  able  to  see  that  each  of  the 
major  problems  outlined  here  is  more  or  less  involved 
with  all  the  others  in  constantly  growing  and  spread 
ing  ramifications  as  the  intensity  of  modern  life  is 
multiplied  and  re-multiplied  by  increased  economic 
and  racial  competition  in  the  arts  and  sciences  of 
war  and  peace. 

Not  so  Mrs.  Atherton,  however;  intuitively  she  gets 
around  her  biggest  difficulty,  or  thinks  she  does,  by 
assuming  that  Votes  for  Women  and  Socialism  and 
the  Bahai  religion  are  going  to  abolish  war  in  a 
hurry.  And  the  way  she  goes  about  bringing  peace 
on  earth  is  by  stirring  up  strife,  and  by  insisting 
that  an  increasing  proportion  of  the  women  of  Eng 
land,  civilization's  apex,  are  forced  to  smash  shop 


MRS.  ATHERTON  441 

windows  and  maul  prime  ministers  every  day  or  two, 
by  the  wrongs  that  they  and  their  sex  have  received, 
or  think  they  have  received,  at  the  hands  of  men. 

Mrs.  Atherton  furnishes  sufficient  evidence  in  Julia 
France  to  prove  to  the  average  impartial  mind  that 
many  of  these  real  or  fancied  wrongs  are  wrongs  that 
they  insist  on  bringing  on  themselves. 

Julia  France,  in  the  floodtide  of  her  conversion, 
after  initiation  in  the  company  of  an  older  woman 
into  the  way  to  make  a  cabinet  minister's  life  misera 
ble,  goes  down  into  the  slums  of  a  big  Midland  col 
liery  town  with  a  chip  on  her  shoulder,  looking  for 
trouble. 

She  finds  "  a  convenient  box  on  a  corner  "  and  "  be 
gan  to  address  eight  or  ten  young  men  and  women. 
In  a  few  minutes  the  group  has  become  a  crowd  that 
blocked  the  street." 

This  pleases  Julia  at  first.  So  does  their  initial 
sarcasms  which  help  to  focus  the  limelight  more  viv 
idly  on  her.  But  presently  it  appears  that  they  are 
not  going  to  let  her  have  the  limelight  all  to  herself. 
They  begin  to  make  loud  and  unpleasant  remarks. 
They  continue  to  make  them.  "  Finally  one  hurled 
a  vile  epithet  at  her.  .  .  .  But  she  was  not  conscious 
of  any  fear.  .  .  .  What  she  really  felt  was  the  pro 
found  disdain  of  the  aristocrat  for  the  brainless 
mob  —  here  was  one  section  of  the  poor  that  might 
go  to  the  devil  for  all  the  help  and  sympathy  it  would 
ever  get  from  her.  But  of  these  and  other  uncom 
plimentary  sensations  she  betrayed  no  more  than 
she  did  of  fear." 

Mrs.  Atherton  may  not  be  conscious  of  any  humor, 


442     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

obvious  or  otherwise,  in  the  lines  quoted  above,  nor 
yet  in  the  paragraphs  that  follow.  At  any  rate, 
just  at  the  near-tragic  moment  of  crisis,  Julia  "  drew 
a  long  breath  of  relief.  She  had  grown  to  look  upon 
the  British  policeman  as  her  natural  enemy ;  but  now 
she  hailed  him  as  her  only  friend  on  earth.  To 
her  amazement  the  policemen  pushed  their  way 
through  the  mob  and  jerked  her  off  the  box. 

"  '  Nice  doings,  this,'  cried  one  indignantly.  '  Ob 
structing  traffic  and  collecting  crowds.  Ain't  you 
Suffragettes  ever  going  to  have  sense?  ' 

We  may  pause  to  dwell  upon  this  last  sentence  for 
a  moment  before  we  observe  that  Julia,  "  with  still 
deeper  indignation,"  objects  vociferously :  "  Couldn't 
you  hear  them  using  language  that  alone  ought  to 
send  them  to  jail?  And  couldn't  you  see  that  they 
would  have  torn  me  to  pieces  in  another  moment? 
Why  don't  you  arrest  them  ?  ' 

"  '  It's  you  that  we're  going  to  arrest.  It's  you 
that's  obstructing  traffic  —  not  them.  They're  out 
for  their  half-holiday.' 

"  *  But  I  tell  you  they  threatened  me  with  violence  ' 
—  and  Julia,  filled  with  a  wrath  of  which  she  had 
never  dreamed  herself  capable,  was  dragged  off  — 
and  the  Liberal  candidate  stood  on  the  side  of  the 
street  laughing  softly. 

"  Once  her  fury  so  far  overcame  her  that  she 
struggled  and  attempted  to  break  away.  .  .  .  So 
Julia  spent  twenty-four  hours  in  prison.  .  .  .  She 
was  too  infuriated  to  sleep  and  forget  for  a  moment 
the  gross  injustice  to  which  she  had  been  subjected 
by  the  laws  of  a  country  supposed  to  be  the  most  en 
lightened  on  the  globe.  She  had  mounted  the  box 


MRS.  ATHERTON  443 

to  make  a  peaceable  —  not  an  incendiary  speech  — 
the  vile  creatures  that  had  insulted  and  threatened 
her  were  not  even  reprimanded. 

"  In  a  mind  naturally  fair  and  just  nothing  will 
cause  rebellion  so  profound  as  an  act  of  gross  injus 
tice  —  it  takes  the  personal  indignity  to  sink  deep 
and  bear  results.  Julia  —  cold,  half  fed,  alone,  in  a 
vermin-ridden  cell,  forgot  her  ambitions,  her  artistic 
pleasure  in  playing  a  part  well.  .  .  .  She  would  war 
against  those  stupid  brutes  in  power  as  long  as  they 
left  breath  in  her.  .  .  .  No  wonder  these  chosen 
women  were  superior  to  femininity  and  gowns.  .  .  . 
What  mortal  happiness  they  missed  mattered  noth 
ing.  .  .  .  And  so  Julia  received  her  baptism  of  fire." 

To  a  mind  naturally  fair  and  just,  the  evidences  of 
special-interest  auto-hypnotism  in  this  passage  are 
conclusive  and  elemental. 

There  are  certain  aspects  of  this  account  that  are 
frankly  farcical  so  far  as  literature  is  concerned. 
There  are  certain  aspects  that  bear  the  possible  ear 
marks  of  a  deeply  resented  personal  experience  on 
the  author's  part,  or  the  part  of  her  friends. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  while  Mrs.  Atherton  is  here  un 
consciously  humorous,  she  is  also  unconsciously  and 
naively  human  in  her  presentation  of  Julia's  side  of 
the  case. 

Doubtless  it  is  intensely  exasperating  to  a  certain 
militant  type  of  mind,  having  worked  itself  up  to  a 
state  of  expecting  possible  near-martyrdom  (police- 
protected),  to  find  said  police  protection  on  its  ar 
rival  considerably  more  concerned  with  the  interests 
of  the  community  at  large  and  the  preservation  of 
the  King's  peace  than  with  equal  and  exact  justice 


444  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

to  the  personal  rights  of  each  and  every  militant 
Suffragette  as  she  sees  fit  to  insist  on  them. 

So  a  militant  atheist  might  possibly  protest  at 
being  roughly  handled  after  loudly  advertising  his 
views  in  a  congregation  of  primitive  Methodists  or 
hard-shell  Baptists ;  or  a  radical  socialist  might  con 
ceivably  object  to  the  immediate  results  of  his  vio 
lently  waving  the  red  flag  in  the  eyes  of  a  particularly 
patriotic  and  slightly  intoxicated  chowder  party. 

In  either  case  the  rough  justice  of  the  street  and 
the  police  court  marches  the  male  offenders  off  to 
temporary  retirement  as  the  easiest  and  most  effect 
ive  solution  of  the  problem  of  keeping  them  and  the 
rest  of  the  world  out  of  trouble. 

The  usual  male  verdict  is  that  the  agitator  has  no 
kick  coming,  that  he  was  looking  for  trouble  and 
got  it. 

Unless  we  conclude  that  Mrs.  Atherton  has  been 
writing  with  her  tongue  in  her  cheek  all  the  time,  that 
she  is  wantonly  stirring  up  strife,  amusing  herself  at 
the  expense  of  humanity  and  cynically  pocketing  the 
proceeds  of  literary  sensationalism,  the  intimate 
psychology  and  unconscious  self-revelation  of  the 
incident  related  at  length,  and  all  that  leads  up  to  it, 
make  this  perhaps  the  most  significant  and  memora 
ble  passage  of  the  book. 

At  any  rate,  for  the  average  reader  the  interest 
is  apt  to  pall  after  militancy  begins  to  be  relegated 
to  the  background,  and  Eastern  occultism,  supersex- 
ualization  and  various  other  features  of  Mrs.  Ather- 
ton's  last  attempt  to  draw  strength  out  of  the  uni 
verse  —  and  to  convert  it  into  dollars  and  cents, 
pounds,  shillings  and  pence  and  a  career,  in  a  way 


MRS.  ATHERTON  44<5 

that  no  other  mortal  man  or  woman  certainly  has 
yet  attained  to  —  begin  to  hold  the  boards. 

The  average  reader,  if  he  or  she  has  curiosity 
enough  and  little  enough  love  for  literature,  may  fol 
low  Julia  and  her  fortunes  and  affinities  even  to  the 
bitter  end  and  page  533,  as  well  as  back  to  St.  Kitts 
again  and  to  her  marriage,  startlingly  sudden  though 
conventional  in  form,  to  a  young  San  Francisco  multi 
millionaire,  who  is  destined,  like  earlier  heroes  of  the 
author,  to  clean  up  the  politics  of  his  native  city, 
state,  and  land,  in  ways  best  left  to  the  imagination 
of  her  reader  or  known  to  the  author  herself  alone. 

American  readers  and  Suffragettes  will  find  them 
selves  woefully  disappointed  if  they  take  up  Julia 
France  in  the  hope  that  Mrs.  Atherton's  account  of 
her  career  will  throw  any  new  or  detailed  light  on 
conditions  directly  affecting  the  militant  campaign 
in  this  country. 

It  may  be  that  Mrs.  Atherton  has  kept  her  hands 
off  here  for  strictly  commercialized  reasons,  and  that 
we  are  shortly  to  have  the  American  misadventures  of 
Julia  and  her  friends  specifically  set  forth  in  an  im 
pressionistic  setting  that  only  New  York  itself  — 
and  Mrs.  Atherton  could  ever  expect  to  achieve. 

It  may  be,  however,  that  this  particular  phase  of 
Feminism  in  America  and  of  Mrs.  Atherton's  own 
literary  career  has  reached  its  Swan  Song  in  Julia 
France.  For  the  best  interests  of  all  concerned  we 
may  devoutly  hope  and  pray  that  it  has. 

The  problem  of  the  feminine  unemployed  "  higher 
up " —  what  to  do  with  the  cleverly  superfluous 
women,  to  some  extent  cultured  and  capable,  for 
whose  energies  motoring  and  Bridge,  international 


446  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

marriages  and  domestic  literature,  politics  a  la  Col 
orado  and  Utah,  and  divorce  court  proceedings  a  la 
Newport  and  Reno,  furnish  insufficient  outlets  —  is 
not  the  least  important  or  imperative  of  all  the 
problems  that  modern  civilization,  such  as  it  is, 
forces  upon  us.  It  is  not  confined  to  the  Votes  for 
Women  agitation  alone. 

It  is  a  problem  that  still,  to  some  extent,  has  been 
insufficiently  advertised ;  and  we  can  at  least  thank 
Mrs.  Atherton  for  what  she  has  done  to  render  one 
phase  of  it  acute.  Certainly  she  might  be  worse  as 
well  as  better  employed  than  in  writing  the  books  that 
least  worthily  represent  her. 

In  so  far  as  these  books  form  a  safety  valve  for 
herself  and  her  readers,  whatever  their  subversive 
tendencies  and  decadent  infection,  they  at  least  serve 
one  useful  purpose. 

In  this  sense  at  least  we  may  agree  with  Dr.  Cooper 
that  on  the  whole  "  it  is  no  bad  thing  for  a  nation's 
literature  to  have  such  a  potent  and  unique  force  as 
the  sort  of  intellectual  anarchy  that  is  represented 
by  Mrs.  Atherton  at  her  best." 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  AND  COMMERCIALISM 

"Money  rules  because  men  are  for  sale."  Ferguson,  The 
Religion  of  Democracy. 

"If  the  nation  is  not  to  suffer  by  cheap  complacency  and 
the  triumph  of  ostentatious  mediocrity,  the  whole  educational 
life  must  be  filled  with  a  new  spirit  of  devotion  to  serious 
tasks."  Hugo  Miinsterberg,  American  Problems,  1910. 

HUGO  MUNSTERBERG  is  recognized  here  and  abroad 
as  a  specialist  of  the  first  rank  in  his  chosen  field; 
Robert  W.  Chambers  is  not.  There  are  those  who 
openly  call  him  a  literary  charlatan  or  quack;  there 
are  those  who  veil  their  lack  of  faith  in  him  in  more 
diplomatic  or  evasive  language. 

Very  few  of  his  best  friends  will  pretend  that  his 
later  work  shows  a  serious  spirit  of  devotion  to  any 
thing  but  record-breaking  sales  and  the  most  obvious 
results  of  the  same,  and  to  the  almighty  dollar  that 
inspires  and  creates  them. 

Professor  Miinsterberg  has  proved  to  us,  in  one 
way  or  another,  that,  in  Germany  to-day,  literature 
seriously  considered,  in  verse  and  in  prose,  in  fiction 
as  well  as  the  drama,  is,  on  the  whole,  a  national  as 
set  and  an  educational  force  recognized  and  to  be 
reckoned  with. 

Here  in  America  to-day,  there  is  a  growing  tend 
ency  to  question  the  educational  value  of  fiction  of 

the  order  of  ostentatious  mediocrity  turned  out  whole- 

447 


448     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

sale  by  Mr.  Chambers  and  his  closest  trade  rivals, 
manufactured  and  sold  in  bargain-counter  consign 
ments  over  the  counters  of  the  largest  dry  goods 
stores  of  our  largest  cities  at  the  uniform  rate  of 
$0.98  or  $1.08  per  volume,  in  editions  that  run  regu 
larly  into  the  hundreds  of  thousands,  at  least  once 
or  twice  a  year. 

If  demand  inevitably  breeds  supply,  Mr.  Chambers 
is  less  to  be  blamed  perhaps  for  this  state  of  things 
than  his  consumers,  ultimate  and  parasitic. 

If  the  Waldorf-Astoria  was  the  first  huge  Amer 
ican  hotel  to  provide  exclusiveness  for  the  masses ; 
if  it  remains  still  without  a  rival  as  a  palace  of  de 
light  in  rural  communities,  where  the  St.  Regis  and 
the  Plaza  are  yet  unknown,  then  Mr.  Chambers  en 
joys  the  equally  questionable  distinction  of  having 
provided  a  sense  of  literary  exclusiveness  for  the  peo 
ple  who  live  in  these  hotels,  and  the  people  whose 
ambition  centers  there,  both  on  Manhattan  Island 
and  in  the  outer  darkness  where  the  fame  of  Richard 
Harding  Davis  is  already  eclipsed. 

If  Mr.  Chambers  thoroughly  deserves  to  be  called 
the  prince  of  wholesale  and  cheap  illusion,  of  com 
mercialized  darkness  and  flippant  immorality  in 
American  fiction ;  if  he  gets  the  highest  current  prices 
for  literary  lies  and  extravagant  frivolity  based  on 
false  social  distinction  and  exclusively  patrician 
ideals ;  if  continually  he  assumes  more  than  he  proves, 
and  alternately  professes  the  most  inconsequent  triv 
iality  in  his  treatment  of  contemporary  life  and  a  pose 
of  the  social  reformer  of  Society  from  the  inside,  who 
satirizes  what  he  exploits;  then  it  is  small  won 
der  that  a  comparatively  large  and  unsophisticated 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  449 

section  of  the  reading  public,  who  still  buy  and  read 
his  books,  are  at  a  loss  just  where  and  how  to  place 
him. 

It  is  a  greater  wonder  that,  in  this  era  of  Broad 
way  musical  comedies  and  of  the  wholesale  commer 
cialization  of  every  art  and  artificiality  of  American 
life,  a  fairly  large  proportion  of  his  fellow-country 
men  and  countrywomen  have  at  last  waked  up  to  the 
essential  inconsequence  of  Mr.  Chambers'  later  books ; 
and  to  the  extreme  thinness  of  the  fabric  of  pretense 
and  pretentiousness  out  of  which  he  spins  his  produc 
tions  in  print,  retailed  to-day  everywhere  by  the 
square  yard  and  the  square  inch. 

It  may  or  may  not  do  Mr.  Chambers  equal  and  ex 
act  justice  to  call  him  the  barker  of  the  New  York 
society  side-show,  and  to  suggest  that  his  novels  deal 
ing  with  it  have  about  the  same  relation  to  real  life 
that  the  average  moving  picture  film  of  things  Pari 
sian  has  to  existence  as  it  actually  occurs  in  Paris 
or  anywhere  else.  But  the  fact  remains  that  he  has 
the  same  happy  faculty  of  giving  the  public  what  it 
wants  (or  of  making  it  think  so)  that  characterizes 
the  purveyor  of  the  two  popular  forms  of  amusement 
suggested  above. 

It  is  no  new  discovery  in  the  literary  world  or  out 
of  it,  that  the  Great  American  Public  dearly  loves  a 
literary  gold  brick,  provided  it  is  wrapped  up  and 
handed  out  in  sufficiently  startling  or  diverting  lan 
guage.  Mr.  Chambers'  reading  public  does  not  con 
sist  solely  of  the  very  young  and  unsophisticated  of 
both  sexes,  of  the  lackeys,  butlers,  footmen,  grooms, 
valets,  chauffeurs,  French  maids,  housemaids,  cham 
bermaids  of  the  idle  rich,  together  with  their  masters 


450  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  mistresses,  and  the  rest  that  take  him  seriously, 
or  try  to.  It  also  consists  of  the  people  who  take  a 
perverted  but  very  natural  pleasure  in  watching  his 
effect  on  those  who  are  unable  to  see  through  him, 
and  of  the  literary  cappers  who  stand  in  with  the  sys 
tem  that  has  produced  him. 

So  the  crowd  around  the  shell  game  stands  and 
watches  the  circulation  of  the  nimble  pea  under  the 
hand  of  the  artist  that  produces  it ;  the  misadventures 
of  the  "  come-ons  "  who  think  they  can  beat  the  game ; 
and  the  less  pronounced  activity  of  the  confederates 
and  cappers  in  the  crowd  who  do  their  share  in  pro 
ducing  this  phase  of  the  human  comedy. 

Mr.  Chambers  stands  for  more  than  the  yellow 
peril  of  extreme  commercialism  in  American  litera 
ture;  he  is  something  less  than  the  Great  American 
Joke  in  the  same  field.  It  would  be  hardly  fair  to  a 
greater  man  and  truer  American  to  call  him  the 
Phineas  T.  Barnum  of  American  fiction  ;  none  the  less, 
equally  with  Mr.  Barnum,  he  is  a  man  of  his  time 
and  of  the  day  and  hour;  and  his  rise  to  fame  and 
Philistine  prominence  is  quite  as  symptomatic  of  cer 
tain  fundamental  racial  and  human  qualities  that  he 
shares,  to  our  frequent  sorrow  and  occasional  diver 
sion,  with  the  rest  of  us. 

Dr.  Frederic  Taber  Cooper,  in  Representative 
American  Story  Tellers,  is  inclined  to  take  Mr.  Cham 
bers  seriously.  Not  as  an  exponent  rather  than  a 
personality,  not  from  any  sociological  and  economic 
point  of  view  (in  Dr.  Cooper's  estimation  such  mat 
ters  arc  altogether  out  of  the  field  and  function  of 
literary  criticism  as  he  contrives  to  write  and  publish 
it),  but  as  author  alone. 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  451 

Although  this  particular  critic  admits  many  of  Mr. 
Chambers'  sins  in  the  past,  none  the  less  he  has  hopes 
of  the  novelist's  future,  and  he  sees  no  reason  why 
Mr.  Chambers  should  not  be  remembered  as  the  pro 
ducer  of  a  comprehensive  Human  Comedy  of  New 
York. 

He  does  not  give  us  any  conclusive  reason  or  rea 
sons  for  this  opinion  of  his.  He  begins  by  suggest 
ing  that  Mr.  Chambers  is  naturally  a  born  story 
teller  rather  than  a  novelist.  He  says  that  a  story 
teller  is  born  and  not  made,  while  a  fairly  good  novel 
may  be  written  by  the  simple  but  patient  process  of 
taking  infinite  pains. 

He  does  not  suggest  that  Mr.  Chambers  has  ever 
taken  infinite  pains  with  any  novel  that  he  has  pro 
duced.  He  says :  "  The  elementary  principle  of 
Economy  of  Means  is  a  rule  for  which  Mr.  Chambers 
seems  to  have  no  use.  He  has  found  by  experience 
that  the  public  likes  to  listen  to  him,  and  so  long  as 
they  listen  he  sees  no  reason  for  curtailing  to  fifty 
words  a  sentence  which,  left  to  itself,  flows  along  to 
upward  of  one  hundred.  In  his  latest  books  he  sees 
no  more  objection  in  interrupting  the  progress  of  a 
plot  by  a  few  pages  of  unnecessary  dialogue  than  in 
his  earlier  period  he  saw  the  harm  of  delaying  prog 
ress  with  superfluous  paragraphs  of  quite  wonderful 
and  vivid  description. 

"  In  other  words,  the  impression  left  by  Mr.  Cham 
bers'  work  as  a  whole  is  that  he  has  not  chosen  to 
study  carefully  and  to  practice  the  best  technique  of 
the  recognized  masters  of  modern  fiction.  He  pro 
fesses  to  begin  and  to  end  a  story  when  he  pleases, 
regardless  of  the  question  whether  this  beginning  and 


452     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

end  coincide  with  those  dictated  by  the  best  art." 

Mr.  Cooper  thinks  that  this  is  curious,  in  view  of 
the  fact  that  Mr.  Chambers  studied  art  for  more 
than  seven  years  in  New  York  and  Paris,  and  had 
exposed  paintings  in  the  Salon  before  he  returned  to 
New  York  in  189S,  at  the  age  of  twenty-eight,  to 
attain  an  initial  local  prominence  as  an  illustrator 
for  Life,  Truth  and  Vogue. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  career  of  Mr.  Chambers,  in 
art  as  well  as  in  fiction,  is  an  admirable  instance  of  the 
application  of  the  principle  of  the  easiest  way  to  the 
chase  of  the  almighty  dollar  and  social  distinction. 

It  is  an  equally  admirable  example  of  the  pressure 
of  environment  upon  character  or  its  absence. 

The  facts  speak  for  themselves.  Mr.  Chambers 
comes  back  to  New  York,  after  seven  years  spent  in 
Paris,  at  the  culmination  of  his  formative  period. 
There  is  no  evidence  extant  to  show  that  he  took  him 
self  seriously,  with  any  lasting  success,  as  a  painter 
or  illustrator.  Naturally  he  wanted  a  wider  recog 
nition  than  that  involved  in  contributions  to  the  three 
most  frivolous  and  ephemeral  publications  of  any 
commercial  standing  that  New  York  has  ever  known. 

Naturally  he  went  to  work  to  transcribe  the  life 
that  he  had  lived  and  seen  in  Paris,  as  a  painter  might 
work  up  sketches  of  any  environment  known  to  him, 
for  publication.  Mr.  Cooper  considers  In  the  Quar 
ter,  1893,  one  of  his  novels  that  cannot  be  dis 
regarded,  "  unmistakably  a  series  of  pen  drawings,  of 
things  actually  lived  and  seen,  a  pell-mell  gathering 
of  the  humor  and  pathos,  the  gladness  and  the  pain 
of  the  modern  art  student's  life  .  .  .  curiously  old- 
fashioned  in  structure.  .  .  .  There  is  not  an  episode 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  453 

that  you  wish  to  prune  away  —  they  are  so  frankly 
enjoyable  for  their  own  sake." 

On  the  whole,  in  contrast  with  much  of  his  later 
work,  In  the  Quarter  is  very  well  worth  reading. 
So  is  much  of  The  King  in  Yellow,  his  third  book, 
published  in  1895,  and  consisting  in  part  of  a  series 
of  short  stories  characterized  by  the  same  commer 
cialized  mingling  of  motives  of  curiosity  and  horror 
later  treated  with  more  success  in  The  Maker  of 
Moons.  The  latter  half  of  the  book  —  including  The 
Demoiselle  d'Ys,  an  exquisite  bit  of  modern  mediaeval 
drama  romance,  and  The  Street  of  the  Four  Winds, 
The  Street  of  the  First  Shell,  The  Street  of  Our 
Lady  of  the  Fields  and  Rue  Baree,  wherein  he  reverts 
to  the  Latin  Quarter  at  the  time  of  the  siege  of  Paris 
by  the  Prussians  —  contains  much  of  the  work  that 
makes  Mr.  Cooper  consider  his  early  short  stories  bet 
ter  than  his  later  ones,  and  claim  that  he  is  the  au 
thor  of  at  least  half  a  dozen  tales  that  deserve  to  rank 
among  the  very  best  that  American  writers  have 
produced.  The  Mystery  of  Choice  is  classed  by  him 
in  this  series. 

He  disregards  A  King  and  a  Few  Dukes,  which  is 
an  inimitable  opera-bouffe  romance  of  The  Prisoner 
of  Zenda  order,  to  which  the  author's  love  of  outdoor 
life  and  apparent  interest  in  trout-hatching  and  but 
terfly-catching  gives  a  slight  substratum  of  reality; 
and  The  Conspirators,  an  inferior  effort  of  the  same 
nature;  to  consider  Lorraine,  Ashes  of  Empire,  The 
Red  Republic  and  The  Maids  of  Paradise,  ranging 
in  date  of  publication  from  1894  to  1903,  which  he 
thinks  "  belong  together  for  the  twofold  reason  that 
they  all  four  have  the  Franco-Prussian  War  as  a 


454     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

setting  and  dashing  young  Americans  for  their 
heroes." 

Of  these  four,  the  Red  Republic,  1894,  which  pre 
sents  vividly  certain  phases  of  Parisian  life  under  the 
Commune,  deserves  to  be  seriously  considered. 

Concerning  the  other  three,  Mr.  Cooper  is  near 
enough  to  the  truth  when  he  says :  "  He  happens  to 
know  unusually  well  both  the  history  and  the  topog 
raphy  of  France  during  the  period  which  he  chooses 
to  treat;  he  attempts  no  ambitious  character  study; 
he  takes  no  daring  liberties  with  recorded  facts ;  he 
is  content  to  tell  a  series  of  rattling  good  stories  that 
not  only  keep  you  moving  with  them.  .  .  .  One  may 
venture  to  risk  the  conjecture  that  he  would  never 
have  written  these  books  at  all  had  it  not  been  for 
the  sudden  popularity,  a  decade  ago,  of  the  adven 
ture  novel,  coupled  with  his  own  fatal  facility  for 
turning  out  pretty  nearly  any  sort  of  story  that  he 
chooses  to  undertake.  Had  he  cared  more  for  his 
work,  we  should  have  had  in  these  books  characters 
less  wooden  and  more  like  real  people  and  episodes 
more  uniformly  serious  and  less  apt  to  approach  the 
border  line  of  farce." 

This  last  sentence,  while  true  enough  with  regard 
to  Mr.  Chambers'  work  as  a  whole,  has  a  more  limited 
application  to  the  volumes  of  this  particular  series 
than  Mr.  Cooper  claims.  It  is  true  that  The  Maids 
of  Paradise,  which  is  technically  the  best  of  the  books, 
has  to  do  with  the  misadventures  of  a  Yankee  circus 
which  is  marooned  in  Brittany  at  the  time  of  the  fall 
of  Napoleon  III,  as  well  as  with  an  attempt  to  cap 
ture  a  treasure  train  of  gold  from  the  Bank  of 
France ;  it  is  true  that  Mr.  Chambers  takes  the  easiest 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  455 

way  of  adding  interest  to  the  two  heroines  of  Ashes 
of  Empire  by  giving  them  a  tame  lioness  for  a  pet 
as  well  as  a  whole  bird-shop  full  of  smaller  animals 
and  winged  creatures.  But  there  is  nothing  farcical 
about  the  grim  chronicles  of  murder  in  The  Red  Re 
public,  and  Lorraine  is  written  in  a  spirit  of  fervid 
romanticism  that  makes  one  feel  almost  as  if  the 
American  who  wrote  the  book  was  a  Frenchman  and 
a  patriot  of  1870  himself. 

There  is  something  of  the  same  sense  of  contem 
porary  illusion  in  Cardigan,  1901,  which,  like  the  rest 
of  its  series,  Mr.  Cooper  disregards,  and  which  was  the 
first  of  three  historical  novels  dealing  with  our  own 
Revolutionary  and  pre-Revolutionary  period.  There 
is  a  great  deal  of  careful  work  in  Cardigan  and  in 
The  Reckoning,  and  not  a  little  in  The  Maid  at  Arms, 
which  is  distinctly  inferior  to  the  other  two,  to  jus 
tify  Mr.  Cooper's  general  conclusion  that  Mr.  Cham 
bers  enjoys  a  graphic  power  of  visualization,  an  abil 
ity  to  handle  crowds  and  to  give  one  a  sense  of  the 
tumult  and  uproar  of  angry  throngs  and  the  din  and 
havoc  of  battle,  and  that  he  possesses  to  an  excep 
tional  degree  the  trick  of  conveying  a  sense  of 
motion. 

At  first  reading  Cardigan  appears  to  be  a  brilliant 
bit  of  work.  More  careful  analysis,  however,  reveals 
comparatively  little  except  the  conventional  plot 
machinery  of  the  commonplace  historical  novelist 
and  the  painter's  trickery  of  massing  effects  pictur 
esquely  to  confirm  the  reader's  first  impression. 

Cardigan  consists  of  a  series  of  sufficiently  vivid 
historical  tableaux,  a  schoolroom  scene  at  the  home  of 
Sir  William  Johnson,  Commissioner  for  the  Crown 


456     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  Indian  Affairs  in  North  America  in  17^,  a  fish 
ing  party  in  the  woods  near  by,  a  dancing  of  the  min 
uet,  an  incident  on  the  trail  to  Fort  Pitt,  a  parley 
in  the  Long  House  of  the  Iroquois,  a  riot  at  Fort 
Pitt,  a  view  of  the  interior  of  the  debtors'  prison  in 
Boston,  and  finally  another  interior  view  of  Buck- 
man's  Tavern  at  Lexington  during  the  British  attack 
on  the  town. 

These  pictures  are  most  of  them  brilliantly  exe 
cuted.  They  dovetail  into  each  other  well  enough, 
with  a  sufficiently  accurate  sense  of  historical  perspec 
tive  from  the  most  obvious  point  of  view.  Through 
them  the  schoolboy  who  tells  the  story  and  the  school 
girl  that  is  destined  on  the  first  page  to  be  his  wife  on 
the  last,  in  the  conventional  manner  of  historical  nov 
els  and  novelists  for  the  last  two  hundred  years,  pass 
plausibly  and  develop  sufficiently  to  hold  the  reader's 
attention  for  the  time  being  and  no  longer.  There 
is  no  effort,  successful  or  unsuccessful,  to  represent 
the  general  temper  or  tendency  of  the  times. 

The  whole  Revolutionary  agitation  and  uprising, 
in  spite  of  the  careful  portraits  of  Jack  Mount  and 
one  or  two  more  incidental  "  Friends  of  Liberty," 
serves  simply  as  a  frame  for  the  picture  of  the  mo 
ment  and  an  obscure  background  for  the  whole  series 
of  carefully  posed  and  proportioned  tableaux.  None 
the  less,  Cardigan,  conventional  though  it  is  in  some 
respects,  remains  a  fine  and  stirring  historical  ro 
mance,  fit  for  comparison  with  all  but  the  best  of  its 
type  in  English  and  American  literature,  and  having 
a  very  perceptible  intensity  and  charm  of  its  own. 

This  intensity  and  charm  is  heightened  and  deep 
ened  in  The  Reckoning.  Much  the  same  method  is 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  157 

followed  as  in  Cardigan,  but  save  in  the  first  few  chap 
ters,  where  we  have  a  picturesque  account  of  affairs 
in  New  York  City  under  British  rule  during  the  last 
year  of  the  war,  the  artificiality  of  the  treatment  is 
less  obvious. 

Girus  Renault,  who  tells  the  story  in  his  own  words 
—  a  favorite  method  for  Mr.  Chambers,  who  consist 
ently  takes  the  easiest  way  to  secure  interest  in  his 
heroes  and  heroines ;  who  is  twenty-three  years  old  at 
the  beginning  of  the  book,  and  who  has  served  for 
four  years  as  an  American  spy  and  private  secretary 
to  one  of  the  most  prominent  of  New  York's  loyalist 
citizens,  refuses  for  some  time  to  be  beguiled  into 
falling  in  love  with  the  Honorable  Elsin  Gray,  ward 
of  the  Governor  of  Canada,  recently  released  from 
a  convent  at  an  age  estimated  by  Mr.  Renault  as 
no  more  than  seventeen  or  eighteen. 

Later  it  develops  that  Elsin  has  found  time  to  be 
married  secretly  to  Walter  Butler,  whose  historic 
reputation  as  arch-devil  of  the  Canadian-Indian 
atrocities  along  the  New  York  frontier  needs  no 
heightening  by  Mr.  Chambers. 

The  author  has  resisted  the  temptation  to  employ 
startlingly  impressionist  methods  in  his  portraiture 
of  Butler,  who  also  appears  in  Cardigan,  with  the 
result  that  a  very  vivid  historical  character  remains 
in  his  hands  somewhat  colorless  and  unconvincing. 

Butler  comes  to  New  York  by  sea,  suspects  Carus, 
and  is  on  the  point  of  exposing  him,  when  Elsin  rises 
to  the  emergency,  declares  that  a  compromising  docu 
ment,  found  by  Butler  in  Renault's  room,  was  placed 
there  by  herself  as  a  practical  joke;  secures  from  Sir 
Henry  Clinton  a  pass  through  the  British  lines  for 


458     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Cams  and  herself,  on  the  plea  that  they  are  about 
to  start  for  the  local  Gretna  Green;  and  manages 
to  escape  by  night  with  him  to  Washington's  head 
quarters  at  North  Castle. 

Mr.  Chambers  here  shows  himself  sufficiently  a 
master  of  rapid  action  and  the  forced  development 
of  a  child  into  a  woman,  to  keep  this  part  of  the 
book  within  the  bounds  of  plausibility.  Temporarily 
in  safety,  Elsin  reverts  once  more  from  woman  to 
child ;  there  is  an  idyllic  charm  about  her  brief  stay 
in  safety  with  Cams,  and  a  Sunday  preaching  to 
the  Continental  troops  that  are  admirably  done. 

Washington  is  kept  studiously  in  the  background, 
and  never  appears ;  Renault's  services  being  such  as 
cannot  with  safety  be  publicly  acknowledged  at  the 
time. 

Renault  as  a  boy  has  been  adopted  into  the  Iro- 
quois  confederation.  He  is  sent  north  to  the  national 
council  fire  as  sachem  and  ambassador  of  the  Oneidas, 
the  only  one  of  the  Six  Nations  that  remained  friend 
ly  to  the  Colonies  during  the  war,  and  as  spy  on 
the  British  and  on  Butler. 

He  leaves  Elsin  in  comparative  security  in  the  fort 
at  Johnstown,  after  a  somewhat  melodramatic  love 
scene  wherein  she  confesses  that  she  is  Butler's  wife 
in  name  only,  and  Renault's  to  dispose  of  as  he 
chooses.  He  goes  to  the  Council  fire  and  induces  the 
hostile  tribes  to  remain  neutral;  he  sees  them  depart 
before  Butler's  arrival;  he  fails  to  make  Butler  a 
prisoner;  eventually  he  arrives  in  the  middle  of  the 
fighting  at  Johnstown  and  learns  that  Elsin  has 
given  herself  up  to  Butler  in  hopes  that  her  influence 
with  him  will  be  sufficient  to  save  the  women  and  chil- 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  459 

dren  of  the  Mohawk  Valley  from  massacre  during 
this  last  invasion  by  the  British,  Indians,  Tories,  and 
renegades. 

Her  influence  does  not  prove  sufficient.  We  have  a 
few  terse  pictures  of  fire,  murder  and  torture,  handled 
with  commendable  discretion ;  an  admirably  brief  por 
trait  of  Colonel  Marinus  Willett,  the  one  man  ca 
pable  of  holding  the  New  York  frontier  and  the 
granary  of  the  Revolutionary  armies  safe  for  Wash 
ington ;  sketches  in  outline  accurately  proportioned, 
of  Jack  Mount,  Morgan's  rangers,  Dutch  farmers, 
Continental  officers,  Oneida  scouts.  Butler  and  Ross 
are  repulsed  and  routed  at  Johnstown;  and  the  ac 
tion  of  the  story  leaps  forward  to  the  pursuit  and 
destruction  of  Butler's  column  and  its  leader's  death 
in  Canada,  with  a  breadth  and  intensity  of  interest 
that  makes  Carus  and  Elsin  for  the  time  being  mere 
details  in  the  red  reckoning  of  the  New  Yorkers  of 
the  Revolutionary  frontier  with  those  who  had  spared 
neither  age  nor  sex,  sickness  nor  infancy,  in  seven 
long  years  of  fire  and  murder,  torture  and  captivity. 

Inevitably  according  to  Mr.  Chamber's  favorite 
formula,  Carus  finds  Elsin  alive,  though  bearing 
marks  of  brutal  treatment  at  Butler's  hands;  and 
the  book  ends  with  the  close  of  the  war,  the  surren 
der  of  Cornwallis,  and  the  setting  of  the  day  of  their 
marriage. 

Here  we  have  as  an  epilogue  one  of  the  author's 
infrequent  lyric  passages,  worth  quoting  at  least  as 
a  rarity,  and  a  contrast  with  his  more  commercialized 
work : 

"  That  brief  and  lovely  season  which  in  our  North 
land  checks  the  white  onset  of  the  snow,  and  which 


460     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

we  call  the  Indian  summer,  bloomed  in  November 
when  the  last  red  leaf  had  fluttered  to  the  earth. 
A  fairy  summer,  for  the  vast  arches  of  the  sky  burned 
sapphire  and  amethyst,  and  hill  and  woodland,  inno 
cent  of  verdure,  were  clothed  in  tints  of  fairest  rose 
and  cloudy  violet ;  and  all  the  world  put  on  a  magic 
livery,  nor  was  there  leaf  nor  stem  nor  swale  nor  tuft 
of  moss  too  poor  to  wear  some  royal  hint  of  gold, 
deep  veined  or  crusted  lavishly  where  the  crested 
swales  spread,  burnished  by  the  sun. 

"  Snowbird  and  goldfinch  were  with  us  —  the  lat 
ter  veiling  his  splendid  tints  in  modest  russet;  and 
now,  from  the  north  came  to  us  silent  flocks  of  birds 
all  gray  and  rose,  outriders  of  winter's  crystal  cor 
tege,  still  halting  somewhere  far  in  the  silvery  north, 
where  the  white  owls  sit  in  the  firs,  and  all  the  world 
lies  robed  in  ermine. 

"  All  through  that  mellow  Indian  summer  my  be 
trothed  grew  strong,  and  her  hurts  had  nearly 
healed." 

There  is  more  than  picturesque  and  poetic  word- 
painting  and  graphic  rapidity  of  interest  in  this 
book.  Elsin,  though  not  always  consistently  handled, 
remains  one  of  the  author's  most  successful  charac 
ters  in  his  vast  gallery  of  girls,  French  and  Amer 
ican.  Unlike  many  of  them,  she  is  deeper  than  she 
appears  to  be  at  first  sight.  Superficial  charm  she 
possesses  in  common  with  the  rest  of  the  young  wom 
en  that  have  made  Mr.  Chambers  the  Harrison  Fisher 
of  American  literature,  but  there  is  a  real  humanity 
about  her  underneath,  that  like  the  rest  of  the  book 
is  likely  to  stand  the  test  of  time. 

Carus  is   not  less   admirable.     The  boyishness  of 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  461 

his  youth  under  stress,  his  love  of  fine  clothes,  his 
reverence  for  Washington  whom  he  has  never  seen, 
his  natural  desire  to  win  distinction  on  the  field,  his 
hesitation  and  final  resolve  to  serve  as  a  spy  again, 
paralleled  by  Colonel  Willett's  questionable  promo 
tion  from  the  command  of  a  brigade  of  the  Continen 
tal  Line  to  the  obscure  guardianship  of  the  frontier, 
are  all  rendered  with  an  admirable  and  sympathetic 
brevity  that  combine  to  make  him  one  of  Mr.  Cham 
bers'  most  natural,  democratic  and  human  of  heroes. 

In  spite  of  certain  superficialities  of  impression, 
specially  noticeable  in  the  account  of  garrison  life  in 
New  York  and  other  minor  details,  there  is  a  lightness 
and  sureness  of  touch  about  The  Reckoning  that 
shows  the  true  artist  at  his  best,  within  his  limita 
tions,  and  ensures  a  pleasurable  second  or  third  read 
ing  however  prejudiced  we  may  be  by  the  worst  of 
Mr.  Chambers'  later  works. 

To  say  that  in  Cardigan  and  The  Reckoning  he 
found  himself  on  the  frontier,  for  the  time  being; 
that  here  his  natural  facility  and  love  for  outdoor 
life,  for  adventure  and  picturesque  description,  might 
legitimately  have  satisfied  itself;  that  he  might  have 
made  the  American  frontier  his  own,  working  West 
and  South  for  a  hundred  years  or  more,  as  neither 
Cooper  nor  any  other  American  novelist  had  done, 
if  he  had  seen  fit  to  concentrate  himself  and  serve 
a  longer  and  more  painful  apprenticeship  to  the  art 
that  comes  to  him  at  second  hand,  is  to  deal  with 
quantities  unknown  and  comparatively  unimportant 
at  this  moment. 

The  fact  remains  that  Mr.  Chambers,  tempted  by 
the  facile  versatility  which  has  wrecked  so  many  other 


462     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  abler  artists,  or  by  the  obvious  increase  in  finan 
cial  returns,  has  turned  to  other,  less  creditable 
fields ;  that  the  Cardigan  series  is  still  unfinished,  and 
that  the  missing  third  volume  is  not  the  only  loss  to 
him  and  to  us. 

n. 

Taken  as  a  whole,  the  method  and  purpose  of  the 
vast  majority  of  Mr.  Chambers'  novels  and  stories 
of  every  type  and  period,  is  that  of  a  man  who  is,  by 
temperament  and  training  alike,  a  painter  of  sur 
faces  and  very  little  more. 

Mr.  Cooper  makes  the  most  of  the  fact  that  there 
is  one  exception  to  prove  this  rule,  in  the  course  of 
seventeen  years'  work  and  an  output  of  more  than 
thirty  volumes.  He  admits  that  many  of  Mr.  Cham 
bers'  friends  have  declared  Outsiders,  1899,  to  be  his 
one  great  failure.  At  the  same  time  he  calls  it  a  bet 
ter  and  more  sincere  piece  of  work  than  many  of  his 
more  successful  novels.  He  says  it  is  not  surprising 
that  the  book  failed  to  achieve  popularity ;  that  in  it 
the.  author  has  ridiculed  American  culture  and  Amer 
ican  social  standing;  and  has  expressed  freely  and 
forcibly  his  attitude  toward  publishers,  critics  and 
life  in  general  in  New  York.  He  admits  that  it  is 
done  largely  in  caricature;  he  says  that  it  is  carica 
ture  that  is  easily  recognized;  he  fails  to  add  that 
much  of  it  is  the  caricature  largely  unconscious  of  a 
man  whose  chief  use  for  sincerity  seems  to  be  to  get 
back  at  the  people  and  things  that  have  rasped  his 
own  personal  susceptibilities.  He  quotes  as  memo 
rable  the  following  passage: 

"  Suddenly   he   realized   the   difference   between   a 
city  in  the  Old-World  acceptance  of  the  term,  and 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  463 

the  city  before  his  eyes  —  this  stupendous  excres 
cence  of  naked  iron,  gaunt  under  its  skin  of  paint, 
flimsily  colossal,  ludicrously  sad  —  and  this  half -be 
gun,  irrational,  gaudy,  dingy  monstrosity  —  this 
temporary  fair-ground,  choked  with  tinsel,  ill-paved, 
ill-lighted,  stark,  treeless,  swarming,  crawling  with 
humanity." 

In  one  way  this  passage  is  memorable.  It  is  a 
notable  example  of  how  English  should  not  be  writ 
ten.  It  is  obviously  more  superficial  than  discern 
ing  ;  it  does  not  quite  represent  Mr.  Chambers  at  his 
worst,  but  it  is  a  fair  sample  of  his  modern  descrip 
tive  style  when  he  really  tries  to  let  himself  out. 

Needless  to  say,  there  is  very  little  of  it  in  his  later 
series  of  lighter  books  calculated  to  please  the  public 
—  including  volumes  of  short  stories  and  brief  prose 
extravaganzas  like  The  Tree  of  Heaven,  A  Young 
Man  in  a  Hurry,  In  Search  of  The  Unknown,  Some 
Ladies  in  Haste,  A  Tracer  of  Lost  Persons,  The 
Green  Mouse,  The  Adventures  of  a  Modest  Man; 
artistic  and  social  satires  like  lole;  charming  out 
door  stories  like  A  Cambric  Mask;  and  Civil  War 
novels  and  novelettes  like  The  Special  Messenger  and 
Ailsa  Paige. 

Here  and  there  in  the  series  of  four  long  novels  of 
contemporary  New  York  Society  life  beginning  with 
The  Fighting  Chance  and  ending  with  The  Danger 
Mark,  in  which  Mr.  Cooper  thinks  he  has  found  him 
self  at  last,  we  do  find  a  yielding  to  the  natural  tend 
ency  to  hit  out  and  hit  back  at  the  things  that  he 
doesn't  like ;  and  which,  both  by  his  long  residence 
abroad  and  his  social  and  professional  associations 
ever  since,  he  is  incapable  of  appreciating  at  their 


464     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

exact  and  evolutionary  value,  either  as  novelist  or 
wider  critic  of  life. 

Mr.  Cooper  thinks  that  The  Firing  Line  and  The 
Younger  Set  which  have  to  do  with  divorce  uncon- 
clusively  and  indifferently,  are  so  much  worse  than 
The  Fighting  Chance  and  The  Danger  Mark  that 
they  may  be  left  out  of  the  discussion.  In  the  last 
two  books  he  admits  that  he  becomes  every  now  and 
then  mildly  exasperated  with  Mr.  Chambers :  "  Not 
because  his  work  is  bad  but  because  it  falls  just  short 
of  being  something  a  great  deal  better." 

Passages  like  the  following  suggest  cause  for  ex 
asperation  more  than  mild :  "  By  January  the  com 
plex  social  mechanism  of  the  metropolis  was  whirl 
ing  smoothly  again.  .  .  .  The  glittering  machine, 
every  part  assembled,  refurbished,  repolished  and 
connected,  having  been  given  preliminary  speed  tests 
at  the  Horse  Show  and  a  tuning  up  at  the  opera 
was  now  running  under  full  velocity ;  and  its  steady 
subdued  whir  quickened  the  chattering  pulse  of  the 
city,  keying  it  to  a  sublimely  syncopated  ragtime. 
.  .  .  Like  a  set  piece  of  fire  works  spectacle  after 
spectacle  glittered,  fizzed  and  was  extinguished,  only 
to  give  place  to  new  and  more  splendid  spectacles ; 
separate  circles,  sets  and  groups  belonging  to  the 
social  solar  system  whizzed,  revolved,  rotated,  with 
edifying  effects  on  every  one  concerned,  unconcerned 
and  not  at  all  concerned.  .  .  .  And  the  social  arbiter 
of  Bird  Center  was  more  of  a  facsimile  of  his  New 
York  confrere  than  that  confrere  could  ever  dream 
of  in  the  most  realistic  of  nightmares." 

Such  passages  do  not  occur  frequently  enough  to 
warrant  Mr.  Cooper's  suggestion  that  the  uneven- 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  465 

ness  of  style  characteristic  of  The  Fighting  Chance 
is  due  to  mere  haste  and  oversight  on  the  author's 
part.  They  appear  to  be  inserted  perversely,  pro 
vocatively,  to  show  how  well  Mr.  Chambers  sees 
through  the  Society  that  he  is  content  to  exploit, 
which  he  takes  just  about  as  seriously  as  he  does  any 
other  financially  available  literary  material ;  and  to 
heighten  the  general  spectacular  effect  of  the  book. 

Mr.  Cooper  says  justly  that  Mr.  Chambers'  por 
traits  of  men  are  better  and  stronger  than  his  fem 
inine  studies  in  fantasy  and  distorted  fact.  There 
is  a  certain  naive  and  childlike  quality  about  his 
criticism  of  the  plot  of  The  Fighting  Chance  that 
deserves  quotation  almost  complete: 

"  In  substance  it  amounts  to  this :  A  young  wom 
an  already  pledged  to  a  man  enjoying  all  the  ad 
vantages  of  wealth  and  position  one  day  meets  an 
other  man,  under  the  shadow  of  a  heavy  disgrace  due 
to  his  intemperate  habits.  They  are  guests  at  the 
same  house  party,  they  are  thrown  much  together, 
and  within  forty-eight  hours  she  falls  unresistingly, 
into  his  arms,  and  yields  her  lips  as  readily  as  any 
servant  girl.  Heredity,  says  the  author;  the  girl 
cannot  help  it ;  the  women  in  her  family  have  for 
generations  been  all  they  ought  not  to  be.  Neverthe 
less  the  reader  retorts,  the  girl  does  not  become  '  all 
that  she  ought  not  to  be.'  During  the  weeks  that 
follow  there  is  many  a  venturesome  scene,  many  a 
dialogue  between  the  two  that  skirts  the  edge  of  im 
propriety;  but  in  spite  of  heredity,  the  lady  never 
quite  loses  her  head;  and  after  they  have  all  sep 
arated  for  the  season  and  she  knows  quite  well  that 
the  man  she  loves  is  drinking  himself  to  death,  when 


466     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

a  word  from  her  would  stop  him,  she  continues  to 
wear  the  other  man's  large  diamond  and  to  play  her 
part  in  the  social  whirl;  and  only  after  the  lapse  of 
many  months  does  it  occur  to  her  that  she  can  effect 
the  salvation  of  a  human  soul  without  in  the  least 
endangering  her  own  reputation,  by  merely  calling 
him  up  on  the  telephone  and  having  a  five  minutes' 
chat.  Now  this  is  not  said  to  belittle  Mr.  Chambers' 
work.  .  .  .  Only  it  does  not  seem  that  a  real  woman 
would  have  acted  that  way.  She  either  would  have 
flung  discretion  to  the  winds  and  done  all  sorts  of 
mad  things  earlier  in  the  game,  and  thrown  the 
blame  upon  heredity ;  or  else  she  would  have  had  suf 
ficient  self-control  to  have  kept  her  lips  her  own  for 
somewhat  longer  than  forty-eight  hours." 

Mr.  Chambers  is  entitled  to  say  that  Mr.  Cooper 
is  in  no  position  to  pronounce  authoritatively  upon 
the  psychology  of  degenerates  such  as  he  chooses  to 
represent. 

Whatever  doubt  there  may  or  may  not  be  about 
this  point,  there  is  no  doubt  whatever  about  his  clever 
ness  in  building  his  book  so  as  to  capture  at  the  start 
that  section  of  the  reading  public  whose  taste  in  fic 
tion  is  as  degenerate  as  his  own,  and  to  hold  their 
attention  securely  through  the  resulting  pages  at 
record  prices  per  word. 

He  makes  his  two  young  degenerates,  Stephen 
Siward  and  Sylvia  Landis,  meet  at  a  railroad  station 
chaperoned  only  by  a  dog  which,  together  with  other 
dogs  and  several  square  miles  of  shooting  country, 
help  to  give  a  sporting  turn  to  the  story.  Before 
they  reach  the  house  in  the  course  of  an  hour's  drive, 
he  has  them  on  terms  of  "  the  gayest  understanding." 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  467 

Subsequently  they  meet  and  embrace  in  the  corridor 
outside  of  their  respective  rooms,  and  on  one  occasion 
inside  of  hers,  in  order  that  the  subsequent  plot  ma 
chinery  of  blackmail  and  the  literary  vivisection  of 
three  or  four  more  degenerates  in  Society  and  out 
of  it,  may  be  started  early  in  the  game  and  the 
reader  given  the  promise  of  a  lot  of  this  sort  of  thing 
to  look  forward  to. 

It  is  only  fair  to  Mr.  Chambers  to  say  that,  when 
he  cares  to  do  this  sort  of  thing,  he  does  it  indifferent 
ly  well.  The  cumulative  degeneration  of  Leroy  Mor 
timer,  his  relations  with  his  wife,  Beverley  Plank, 
Harold  Quarrier  and  Lydia  Vyse,  and  the  joint  black 
mailing  of  Quarrier  by  Mortimer  and  Lydia  in  the 
house  where  he  has  himself  installed  the  girl,  are 
portrayed  with  a  realism  that  is  as  readable  as  it  is 
rare  in  this  part  of  the  world. 

This  phase  of  the  story,  in  which  Mr.  Chambers 
shows  that  he  has  a  great  deal  to  learn  yet  from  the 
men  who  failed  to  teach  him  the  art  of  novelizing 
the  demi-monde  during  the  seven  years  that  he  lived 
in  Paris,  is  on  the  whole  far  from  being  the  least 
conclusive,  or  artistically  the  least  tolerable  part  of 
the  book. 

There  is  no  indication  that  he  has  achieved  a  rigor 
ously  Parisian  literary  conscience,  here  or  elsewhere. 
He  handles  vice  that  commercially  justifies  its  exist 
ence,  as  he  handles  questionable  virtue  that  spectacu 
larly  advertises  his  own  cleverness,  not  with  any 
clarifying  or  inspiring  effect  of  getting  at  the  vital 
problems  of  existence,  but  as  literary  material  super 
ficially  ready  to  his  hand. 

With  the   single   exception  of  Mortimer,  his   sin- 


468     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

ners,  like  his  heroes  and  heroines,  lack  the  breath  of 
life.  Harold  Quarrier  and  the  woman  that  he  final 
ly  marries  are  sufficiently  improbable  to  be  quite  at 
home  in  the  pages  of  Lady  Novelists  of  the  caliber 
of  Elinor  Glyn  and  Marie  Corelli. 

The  other  characters  compose  well  enough  into  the 
pictures  that  Mr.  Chambers  chooses  to  paint.  Taken 
by  themselves  —  with  the  exception  of  Beverley  Plank 
who  is  rather  a  superior,  good-natured,  simple-mind 
ed,  well-meaning  snob  among  inferior  snobs,  and 
whose  friendship  for  Siward  is  the  one  decent  human 
interest  of  the  book  —  they  bear  a  curious  resem 
blance  to  the  rudimentary  figures  of  a  tragi-comedy 
of  marionettes. 

Stephen  Siward,  who  inherits  the  curse  of  drink 
in  order  to  make  him  interesting  to  Sylvia  Landis 
and  a  sufficient  quantity  of  Mr.  Chambers'  readers, 
is  pictured  like  the  majority  of  the  author's  heroes 
and  heroines  as  young,  handsome,  clever,  charming, 
socially  eligible  and  sexually  rather  irresistible.  We 
are  assured  in  this  case  by  a  clubman  and  contempo 
rary,  that  in  one  way,  with  women,  he  has  always 
been  singularly  decent. 

When  he  discovers  that  the  girl  who  reciprocates 
his  somewhat  volcanic  passion  up  to  a  certain  point, 
insists  on  marrying  her  multi-millionaire,  he  shuts 
himself  up  in  his  old  house  near  Washington  Square 
and  deliberately  begins  to  drink  himself  to  death. 
He  gets  tired  of  this  and  goes  to  Muldoon's.  He 
is  cured  temporarily  by  the  ex-wrestler  and  physical 
culture  specialist.  He  relapses  and  goes  back  to 
the  care  of  an  old  family  doctor  and  an  old  family 
servant  who  like  Beverley  Plank  helps  to  exemplify 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  469 

the  religion  of  snobbery  on  grounds  that  seem,  to 
say  the  least,  unwarranted  as  pictured  here. 

During  one  of  his  periods  of  convalescence,  Plank 
is  taken  to  see  him  by  Billy  Fleetwood. 

"  Politics  were  touched  upon  .  .  .  the  sport  of 
boss  baiting  providing  a  new  amusement  for  the  idle 
rich  .  .  .  city,  state  and  national  issues  were  run 
through  lightly,  business  conditions  noted  .  .  .  pres 
ently  conversation  died  out.  .  .  .  '  You  haven't  dis 
coursed  upon  art,  literature  and  science  yet  and  you 
can't  go  till  you've  adjusted  the  affairs  of  the  na 
tion  for  the  next  twenty-four  hours.' 

"  '  Art,'  yawned  Fleetwood.  '  Oh,  pictures.  Don't 
like  'em.  Nobody  ever  looks  at  them  except  debu 
tantes  who  do  it  out  of  deviltry  to  floor  a  man  at  a 
dinner  or  a  dance.  .  .  .  Science,  Spider  Flynn  is 
matched  to  meet  Kid  Halloway ;  is  that  what  you 
mean,  Stephen?  Somebody  tumbled  out  of  an  air 
ship  the  other  day;  is  that  what  you  mean?' 

Opinions  may  differ  as  to  the  exact  identification 
of  this  point  of  view  with  Mr.  Chambers's  own.  The 
fact  remains  that  he  has  chosen  as  the  hero  of  his 
most  ambitious  book  before  The  Common  Law,  a 
drunken  degenerate  who  is  not  visited  either  in  sick 
ness  or  in  health  by  people  of  more  importance  and 
significance  in  the  world  than  Plank  and  Fleetwood, 
because,  with  every  initial  advantage  of  wealth  and 
social  position  in  New  York,  he  has  never  taken  any 
trouble  to  become  acquainted  with  the  real  people  of 
the  real  world. 

He  is  a  puppet;  we  are  supposed  at  Mr.  Cham 
bers'  suggestion,  to  consider  him  a  clever,  charming, 
chivalrous  and  truly  interesting  one,  pulled  by  the 


470     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

strings  of  his  hereditary  vice  and  the  impulse  of  the 
moment,  and  imperfectly  restrained  from  making  a 
bestial  spectacle  of  himself  on  the  streets  by  his  in 
bred  sense  of  what  is  due  to  good  form  and  good 
breeding. 

Either  through  incompetence  or  indifference,  he 
lets  his  business  affairs  get  into  a  state  where  he  is 
about  to  be  ruined,  when  Plank  steps  in  and  rescues 
him. 

The  brief  account  of  Plank's  financial  battles  with 
Quarrier  and  his  chief  confederate,  wherein  we  are 
told  at  the  climax  of  the  campaign,  that  a  certain 
judge  had  been  bought,  and  value  given  in  return, 
is  about  as  inconclusive,  and  requires  about  as  much 
to  be  taken  on  trust  and  insufficient  pretense,  as  nine- 
tenths  of  the  rest  of  the  book. 

Sylvia  Landis  is  rather  more  of  a  marionette  than 
Siward  himself.  Stripped  of  her  superficial  charm 
and  her  inherited  sexual  allure,  she  is  simply  a  blind 
hunger  for  money  and  social  position.  She  admits 
this  to  herself  and  to  Siward.  She  binds  Quarrier 
by  the  terms  of  a  long  engagement,  and  lets  him  do 
as  he  likes  in  the  meantime,  provided  she  is  given  the 
same  liberty. 

As  the  day  of  her  wedding  approaches,  she  hasn't 
even  the  courage  of  her  commercialized  convictions ; 
she  finds  it  impossible  to  let  Quarrier  kiss  or  embrace 
her;  she  calls  Siward  up  on  the  telephone  and  pro 
ceeds  to  fall  into  his  arms  after  Plank  has  assured 
Siward  that  he,  Siward,  is  stronger  than  she,  and  that 
the  happiness  of  both  is  involved  in  his  taking  con 
trol  of  their  two  lives.  This  Siward  proceeds  to  do. 

"  He  looked  into  her  eyes  .  .  .  she  looked  back 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  471 

with  the  divine  untroubled  gaze  of  a  child  .  .  .  and 
deep  in  his  body  as  he  stood  there  he  heard  the  low 
challenge  of  his  soul  on  guard ;  and  he  knew  that 
the  enemy  listened." 

And  so  the  book  ends. 

Mr.  Chambers  has  an  apparently  careless  habit 
of  tossing  words  like  darling,  divine,  charming,  pleas 
ant,  clever,  delightful,  around  loosely,  and  expecting 
us  to  be  suitably  impressed  with  the  ease  and  sup 
posed  unconscious  grace  with  which  he  does  it.  This 
detail,  like  other  superficial  faults  in  a  tissue  of  super 
ficialities,  is  of  comparatively  minor  importance. 

What  is  more  to  the  point,  if  The  Fighting  Chance 
has  any  moral  values  at  all  aside  from  the  waste  of 
time  and  perversion  of  power  involved  in  the  case 
of  the  author  and  some  hundreds  of  thousands  of  his 
readers,  is  our  being  led  to  suppose  that,  as  a  re 
sult  of  Stephen's  stern  self-assertion  and  Sylvia's 
supreme  self-denial  in  the  matter  of  Quarrier's  mil 
lions,  these  two  spoiled  children  of  all  creation  are 
left  to  marry  and  live  happy  ever  after  on  an  in 
come  fairly  comfortable  even  on  Manhattan  Island, 
without  the  necessity  on  the  part  of  either  or  both  of 
them  to  do  anything  more  to  secure  and  safeguard 
their  happiness  than  what  the  most  obvious  rules 
of  health  and  sobriety  demand. 

People  of  their  type  may  be  common  enough  in 
New  York  society;  here  at  least  the  book  may  be 
true  enough  to  life;  but  neither  there  or  anywhere 
else  has  the  author  any  rational  ground  for  assum 
ing  that  lasting  happiness  for  themselves  or  anyone 
else  is  at  all  likely  to  result  from  any  such  marriage 
as  he  has  made  the  triumphant  climax  of  his  story. 


472     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

Books  like  The  Fighting  Chance  not  only  help  the 
idle  rich  to  take  a  curiously  perverted  and  imperfect 
view  of  their  own  insignificance:  they  tempt  the  idle 
poor  to  do  the  same.  They  induce  thousands  of 
empty-brained  women  of  all  classes,  who  waste  their 
time  over  them,  to  sentimentalize  falsely  over  the 
sham  passion  of  Mr.  Chambers'  marionettes  and  to 
tell  themselves  truly  in  their  commercialized  heart  of 
hearts  that  Sylvia  Landis  was  a  bigger  fool  than  they 
ever  would  have  been  if  they  had  had  her  chance  to 
sell  herself  to  her  multi-millionaire. 

Books  like  this  advertise  in  wholesale  the  commercial 
possibilities  of  matrimony  on  a  large  financial  scale ; 
they  concentrate  feminine  attention  and  appetite 
upon  extravagance  and  irresponsibility ;  they  crowd 
out  other  books  and  other  ideals,  and  they  have  more 
to  do  with  the  tragedies  of  the  divorce-court  and  the 
stock  exchange  than  either  Mr.  Chambers  or  critics 
like  Mr.  Cooper  are  likely  to  imagine. 

In  this  respect,  in  view  of  its  large  circulation  and 
its  trifling  with  truth  from  various  points  of  view, 
The  Fighting  Chance  may  properly  be  considered 
one  of  the  most  immoral  books  ever  published  in 
America. 

As  a  work  of  art  its  inferiority  to  The  House  of 
Mirth,  which  appeared  at  the  same  time,  was  widely 
recognized.  As  a  human  document,  treating  of  life 
in  Society  and  downtown  in  New  York,  it  needs  only 
to  be  compared  to  a  book  like  The  Great  God  Suc 
cess  by  David  Graham  Phillips. 

There  is  a  clarity,  a  sincerity,  a  directness,  an 
inevitableness  about  the  latter,  an  absence  of  arti 
ficiality  and  pretense  and  an  immanence  of  the  es- 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  473 

sential  truth  of  human  nature  and  the  environment 
that  molds  and  is  molded  by  it  in  New  York  to 
day,  in  this  first  novel  of  Mr.  Phillips,  that  is  to  be 
found  neither  in  The  Fighting  Chance  nor  in  any 
thing  that  Mr.  Chambers  has  ever  written. 

The  former  is  less  than  half  the  length  of  the 
other;  there  is  in  it  an  economy  of  means,  a  signal 
illustration  of  this  first  principle  of  the  art  of  fiction, 
and  of  all  other  arts  that  Mr.  Chambers  continually 
violates  for  pecuniary  value  received. 

If  The  Great  God  Success,  which  is  a  thousand 
times  more  powerful  than  The  Fighting  Chance  and 
infinitely  more  memorable,  is  placed  side  by  side  with 
it,  any  fairly  intelligent  reader  of  any  typical  Amer 
ican  newspaper  or  magazine  has  no  difficulty  in  dif 
ferentiating  between  them. 

One  is  the  real  thing ;  one  a  commercialized  effusion 
of  hot  air.  One  is  concrete  and  self-evident  fact; 
one  a  pretentious  and  unedifying  falsehood  and 
failure. 

In  The  Danger  Mark  (1909),  Mr.  Chambers' 
usual  superficial  fertility  in  the  evolution  of  his  plots 
seems  to  have  failed  him.  He  has  seen  fit  merely  to 
reverse  the  mechanism  of  The  Fighting  Chance.  We 
have  the  same  country  house,  with  its  sporting  side 
issues,  bulking  largely  in  the  action  of  the  book,  full 
of  the  same  irrelevant,  unimportant  and  uninspiring 
minor  characters.  In  this  book  the  heroine  is  af 
flicted  with  the  hereditary  curse  of  drink  aggravated 
in  the  course  of  her  childhood  by  a  habit  of  nibbling 
lumps  of  sugar  drenched  in  cologne. 

She  has  moreover  a  temperamental  trait,  also  de 
veloped  in  her  extreme  youth,  of  hitting  out  blindly 


474     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

and  passionately  with  her  fists  whenever  sufficiently 
provoked.  We  are  told  toward  the  close  of  the  book 
that  she  broke  the  bridge  of  the  hero's  nose  at  an 
early  age  during  an  encounter  with  boxing  gloves, 
and  the  knowledge  of  this  seems  to  be  a  bond  of 
union  between  them. 

The  hero,  like  other  heroes  of  Mr.  Chambers  be 
fore  and  since,  is  a  painter  gifted  with  marvelous  and 
quite  unsubstantiated  facility,  as  well  as  with  money 
and  social  standing  of  his  own,  sufficient  to  render 
him  eligible  in  the  homes  of  the  Best  People  on  Man 
hattan  Island  in  spite  of  a  somewhat  sultry  past  in 
Paris  and  other  Continental  centers.  During  the 
panic  of  1907  he  loses  most  of  his  money.  By  this 
time  inspired  by  his  sweetheart's  heroic  struggle 
against  her  besetting  weakness  —  a  large  part  of  said 
struggle  consisting  of  the  shooting  of  wild  boars  on 
skiis,  at  her  country  estate  and  private  preserve  some 
where  in  Eastern  Canada  or  near  there  —  he  has  him 
self  struggled  sufficiently  to  have  attained  wealth  and 
fame  as  a  fashionable  portrait  painter  in  the  city 
where  he  is  most  at  home;  and  where  we  are  given 
to  understand,  without  any  vast  weight  of  testimony 
in  favor  of  the  author's  assumption,  that  happiness 
awaits  him. 

To  say  that  this  book  is  about  as  true  to  life  as 
The  Fighting  Chance  is  to  slander  the  latter  — 
slightly.  At  the  time  of  its  publication  it  met  with 
a  more  immediate  and  outspoken  effusion  of  parody 
and  ridicule  in  New  York  and  elsewhere  than  any 
book  that  has  been  prominently  before  the  American 
public  for  many  years. 

Obviously,  with  the  kind  of  reading  public  which 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  475 

takes  Mr.  Chambers  seriously,  a  reception  of  this 
sort  might  have  been  considered  an  honor  for  some 
books  and  some  authors.  The  only  trouble  about 
any  theory  of  this  sort  is  that  the  only  reading 
public  to  which  Mr.  Chambers's  books  continue  to 
appeal  is  the  public  which,  through  ignorance  or 
perversity,  puts  a  premium  on  shallowness,  insincer 
ity,  pretentiousness,  extravagance,  and  a  lively  sense 
of  the  spectacular  that  verges  on  vice  where  it  does 
not  cross  the  line  in  life  and  literature  alike. 

To  such  the  book  may  be  safely  commended  with 
the  questionable  advertisement  that,  all  things  con 
sidered,  it  might  have  been  worse. 

Nevertheless  there  are  passages  in  the  book  that 
are  worth  quoting  for  one  reason  or  another.  Some 
of  them  betray  Mr.  Chambers'  growing  tendency  to 
try  to  run  with  the  hares  and  hunt  with  the  hounds ; 
to  pose  as  a  critic  and  satirist  of  New  York  Society, 
while  at  the  same  time  continuing  to  augment  his 
sales  by  exploiting  its  caste  pretenses  and  assump 
tions. 

"  The  cotillion  led  by  Dysart  dancing  alone  was 
one  of  those  carefully  thought  out  and  intellectual 
affairs  which  shakes  New  York  society  to  its  intel 
lectual  foundations. 

"  In  one  figure  Geraldine.  came  whizzing  into  the 
room  in  a  Palm  Beach  bicycle-chair  trimmed  with 
orchids  and  propelled  by  Peter  Tappen ;  and  from 
her  seat  among  the  flowers  she  distributed  favors  — 
live  white  cockatoos  —  fans  spangled  with  tiny  elec 
tric  jewels;  parasols  of  pink  silk  set  with  tiny  in 
candescent  lights ;  crystal  cages  containing  great 
pale-green  Luna  moths  alive  and  fluttering;  circus 


476     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

hoops  of  gilt,  filled  with  white  tissue  paper,  through 
which  the  men  jumped." 

"...  She  lay  back  on  the  cushions  with  a  tired 
little  laugh.  '  We  are  like  the  others  of  our  rotten 
lot,  only  less  aged,  less  experienced.  But  we  have 
each  of  us  our  own  heritage,  our  own  secret  deprav 
ity.  .  .  .  It's  all  rotten,  I  tell  you  .  .  .  the  whole 
personnel  and  routine  .  .  .  those  people  and  their 
petty  vices  and  their  idleness  and  their  money !  I  — 
I  do  want  to  keep  myself  above  it  —  clear  of  it  —  but 
what  can  I  do?  One  can't  live  without  friends.  If 
I  don't  gamble,  if  I  don't  flirt,  I'm  isolated.  If  one 
stands  aloof  from  anything  one's  friends  go  else 
where.  .  .  . 

"  I  say  it's  rotten.  ...  All  this  —  the  whole 
thing  —  the  stupidity  of  it  —  the  society  that's  driv 
en  to  these  kinds  of  capers,  dreading  the  only  thing  it 
ever  dreads  —  ennui.  Look  at  it  all.  For  God's 
sake  survey  us  damn  fools,  herded  here  in  our  pinch 
beck  mummery  —  forcing  the  sanctuary  of  these 
green  woods,  polluting  them  with  smoke  and  noise 
and  dirty  little  intrigues.  I'm  sick  of  it." 

"  There's  a  stench  of  money  everywhere ;  there's 
a  stale  aroma  in  the  air  too  —  the  dubious  perfume 
of  decadence,  of  moral  atrophy,  of  stupid  reckless 
ness,  of  the  ennui  that  breeds  intrigue,  ...  of  their 
women  folk,  whose  sole  intellectual  relaxation  is  in 
pirouetting  along  the  danger  mark  without  over 
stepping  and  in  concealing  it  when  they  do;  of  the 
overgroomed  men  who  can  do  nothing,  know  nothing, 
sweat  nothing  but  money  and  what  it  can  buy  —  like 
horses  and  yachts  and  prima  donnas." 

This  is  all  very  well  as  far  as  it  goes  and  taken  by 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  477 

itself.  Shortly  after  we  are  told  that  "  Geraldine 
was  one  of  a  type  characteristic  of  that  city  and  of 
the  sunny  avenue,  where  there  pass  more  beautiful 
women  on  a  December  morning  than  one  can  see 
abroad  in  a  dozen  years'  residence." 

There  is  enough  more  of  this  sort  of  internal  evi 
dence  to  lead  one  to  conclude  that  Mr.  Chambers 
is  about  as  sincere  and  commercialized  in  the  former 
passages  as  in  the  last. 

There  is  a  passage  in  Ailsa  Paige  (1910),  that 
panders  equally  to  the  local  pride  of  snobbery  for 
snobbery's  sake  and  to  the  noblisse  oblige  of  commer 
cialized  pretense  in  the  regions  where  his  heroes  and 
heroines  find  themselves  most  at  home: 

"  To  Ailsa  Paige  the  Seventh  was  always  The 
Guard,  and  now  in  the  lurid  obscurity  of  national 
disaster  .  .  .  out  of  the  dust  of  catastrophe  emerged 
its  disciplined  gray  columns.  Doubters  no  longer 
doubted,  uncertainty  became  conviction ;  in  a  situa 
tion  without  a  precedent,  the  precedent  was  estab 
lished  ;  the  corps  d*  elite  of  all  state  soldiery  was  an 
swering  the  national  summons ;  and  once  more  the 
associated  states  of  North  America  understood  that 
they  were  first  of  all  a  nation  one  and  undivisible.  — 
Above  the  terrible  alarms  of  political  confusion  rolled 
the  drums  of  the  Seventh  steadily  beating  the 
assembly." 

It  is  possible  that  Mr.  Chambers,  who  was  born  in 
Brooklyn,  may  be  equally  sincere  in  his  patriotism 
and  his  local  pride  set  forth  spectacularly  in  the 
pages  of  Ailsa  Paige.  It  is  true  that  the  Seventh 
Regiment  of  New  York  has  a  long  and  worthy  record 
as  a  militia  organization  in  the  field,  and  as  a  training 


478     LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

school  for  officers,  sufficient  to  stand  by  itself  with 
out  the  sort  of  extravagant  exploitation  with  which 
Mr.  Chambers  has  seen  fit  to  advertise  it. 

It  is  true  that  Ailsa  Paige  contains  bits  of  spirited 
character  drawing,  pages  of  graphic  and  essentially 
readable  descriptions  and  suggestions  of  common 
place  manhood's  and  womanhood's  capacity  to  rise 
to  heights  of  heroism  and  devotion  under  the  stress 
of  war. 

None  the  less  the  whole  tendency  of  the  book,  as  in 
the  instance  quoted  above,  is  to  remind  us  irresistibly 
of  packages  of  popcorn,  candy,  cheap  toilet  soap  and 
other  non-essentials  on  which  the  American  flag  is 
displayed  for  commercial  purposes  in  states  where 
the  practice  is  not  forbidden  by  law. 

As  for  The  Common  Law,  whose  "  nude  heroine  " 
was  not  held  in  modest  retirement  by  the  absence  of 
obvious  press  agent  methods  previous  to  and  during 
its  publication  as  a  serial  in  the  yellowest  of  our 
yellow  magazines,  too  much  has  been  said  and  writ 
ten  already  about  it  and  her,  for  the  peace  of  mind 
of  a  long  suffering  public. 

It  is  perhaps  due  to  Mr.  Chambers  to  say  that, 
having  decided  to  utilize  the  nude  heroine  aforesaid 
(who  later  develops  into  rather  a  model  young  lady 
in  the  conventional  sense  of  the  word)  in  the  "  alto 
gether  "  in  a  fashionable  New  York  studio  in  the 
first  chapter  or  two,  the  initial  scenes  in  the  nude 
are  staged  with  a  discreet  dexterity  of  exploitation 
which  is  either  maddening  or  pitiable  according  to 
the  temperament  of  the  critic;  and  that  any  reader 
of  a  salacious  turn  of  mind  looking  for  more  lurid 
pages  later  will  be  grievously  disappointed. 


ROBERT  W.  CHAMBERS  479 

The  bareness  of  the  artifice,  the  suggestiveness  of 
the  title,  the  way  in  which  the  reader  of  this  order 
is  cleverly  strung  along  till  he  reaches  the  last  pages 
and  finds  that  which  began  as  a  rather  highly-colored, 
near-Parisian  romance  subsiding  into  a  New  England 
Sunday  School  story,  is  doubtless  highly  diverting  in 
its  way.  It  also  doubtless  proved  highly  profitable 
to  the  original  perpetrator,  who  has  at  least  proved 
himself  unmistakably  the  most  adroit  literary  faker 
that  America  has  ever  produced. 

Mr.  C.  D.  Gibson  —  whose  failure  to  "  come  back  " 
as  a  portrait  painter  after  his  loss  of  vogue  as  an 
illustrator  is  exploited  in  the  plot  of  the  novel  —  is 
also  to  be  commiserated  in  view  of  the  fact  that  the 
book  is  dedicated  to  him. 

However,  as  Mr.  Gibson  saw  fit  to  illustrate  the 
book,  and  has  doubtless  shared  in  its  unearned  finan 
cial  increments,  we  are  at  liberty  to  suppose  that  he 
feels  about  as  well  satisfied  with  the  final  result  as 
Mr.  Chambers  does. 

More  briefly  and  mildly,  in  the  words  of  a  tabloid 
book  review  by  Mr.  J.  D.  Kerfoot  in  a  recent  copy 
of  Life,  we  may  characterize  The  Common  Law  as 
"  a  pseudo  problem  novel  of  New  York  studio  life 
which  gives  a  clever  imitation  of  being  serious  while 
making  much  ado  about  nothing." 

Mr.  Chambers'  suffragette  stories,  published  in 
Hampton's  Magazine  shortly  before  its  untimely  end, 
do  not  even  pretend  to  do  as  much  or  as  little.  In 
general,  however,  Mr.  Kerfoot's  characterization  of 
his  recent  activity  can  hardly  be  bettered. 

Further  comment  on  this  particular  author's  pres 
ent  and  future  seems  superfluous.  Careful  perusal 


480  LITERATURE  AND  INSURGENCY 

of  Japonette  (1912),  and  The  Streets  of  Ascalon 
(1912),  some  months  after  this  essay  was  written, 
have  not  materially  altered  this  conviction.  There 
is  a  certain  class  of  readers  in  America  to-day  to 
which  Mr.  Chambers's  books  seem  to  appeal.  There 
always  will  be  as  long  as  publishers  of  books  and 
magazines  are  allowed  to  exploit  unchecked  the  least 
sincere  and  inspiring  phases  and  portrayals  of 
American  life.  This  class  unfortunately  is  not  con 
fined  to  that  section  of  Society  which  Mr.  Chambers 
chooses,  for  reasons  of  his  own,  to  satirize,  to  adver 
tise,  and  to  exploit. 

Consequently,  once  a  year  or  so  nowadays,  he  ap 
pears  together  with  his  readers,  admirers,  imitators 
and  closest  trade  rivals,  as  a  product  of  environment 
for  which  the  American  people  is  responsible ;  or  as  a 
by-product  not  altogether  uncharacteristic  of  the 
trend  of  to-day. 

Viewed  in  this  light,  he  may  be  worth  considerable 
study  and  detailed  thought. 

Otherwise,  as  a  literary  producer  and  poseur  whose 
insincerity  is  notorious  and  inveterate,  he  reminds  us 
irresistibly  of  Kipling's  Tomlinson,  for  whose  soul 
after  death  not  even  Satan  himself  could  find  either 
room  or  use. 


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